Smartphone-based geolocation of Internet hosts

The location of Internet hosts is frequently used in distributed applications and networking services. Examples include customized advertising, distribution of content, and position-based security. Unfortunately the relationship between an IP address and its position is in general very weak. This motivates the study of measurement-based IP geolocation techniques, where the position of the target host is actively estimated using the delays between a number of landmarks and the target itself. This paper discusses an IP geolocation method based on crowdsourcing where the smartphones of users operate as landmarks. Since smartphones rely on wireless connections, a specific delay-distance model was derived to capture the characteristics of this novel operating scenario

How to Catch when Proxies Lie: Verifying the Physical Locations of Network Proxies with Active Geolocation

Internet users worldwide rely on commercial network proxies both to conceal their true location and identity, and to control their apparent location. Their reasons range from mundane to security-critical. Proxy operators offer no proof that their advertised server locations are accurate. IP-to-location databases tend to agree with the advertised locations, but there have been many reports of serious errors in such databases. In this study we estimate the locations of 2269 proxy servers from ping-time measurements to hosts in known locations, combined with AS and network information. These servers are operated by seven proxy services, and, according to the operators, spread over 222 countries and territories. Our measurements show that one-third of them are definitely not located in the advertised countries, and another third might not be. Instead, they are concentrated in countries where server hosting is cheap and reliable (e.g. Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, UK, USA). In the process, we address a number of technical challenges with applying active geolocation to proxy servers, which may not be directly pingable, and may restrict the types of packets that can be sent through them, e.g. forbidding traceroute. We also test three geolocation algorithms from previous literature, plus two variations of our own design, at the scale of the whole world

Indoor Geo-location And Tracking Of Mobile Autonomous Robot

The field of robotics has always been one of fascination right from the day of Terminator. Even though we still do not have robots that can actually replicate human action and intelligence, progress is being made in the right direction. Robotic applications range from defense to civilian, in public safety and fire fighting. With the increase in urban-warfare robot tracking inside buildings and in cities form a very important application. The numerous applications range from munitions tracking to replacing soldiers for reconnaissance information. Fire fighters use robots for survey of the affected area. Tracking robots has been limited to the local area under consideration. Decision making is inhibited due to limited local knowledge and approximations have to be made. An effective decision making would involve tracking the robot in earth co-ordinates such as latitude and longitude. GPS signal provides us sufficient and reliable data for such decision making. The main drawback of using GPS is that it is unavailable indoors and also there is signal attenuation outdoors. Indoor geolocation forms the basis of tracking robots inside buildings and other places where GPS signals are unavailable. Indoor geolocation has traditionally been the field of wireless networks using techniques such as low frequency RF signals and ultra-wideband antennas. In this thesis we propose a novel method for achieving geolocation and enable tracking. Geolocation and tracking are achieved by a combination of Gyroscope and encoders together referred to as the Inertial Navigation System (INS). Gyroscopes have been widely used in aerospace applications for stabilizing aircrafts. In our case we use gyroscope as means of determining the heading of the robot. Further, commands can be sent to the robot when it is off balance or off-track. Sensors are inherently error prone; hence the process of geolocation is complicated and limited by the imperfect mathematical modeling of input noise. We make use of Kalman Filter for processing erroneous sensor data, as it provides us a robust and stable algorithm. The error characteristics of the sensors are input to the Kalman Filter and filtered data is obtained. We have performed a large set of experiments, both indoors and outdoors to test the reliability of the system. In outdoors we have used the GPS signal to aid the INS measurements. When indoors we utilize the last known position and extrapolate to obtain the GPS co-ordinates

Computer vision techniques for forest fire perception

This paper presents computer vision techniques for forest fire perception involving measurement of forest fire properties (fire front, flame height, flame inclination angle, fire base width) required for the implementation of advanced forest fire-fighting strategies. The system computes a 3D perception model of the fire and could also be used for visualizing the fire evolution in remote computer systems. The presented system integrates the processing of images from visual and infrared cameras. It applies sensor fusion techniques involving also telemetry sensors, and GPS. The paper also includes some results of forest fire experiments.European Commission EVG1-CT-2001-00043European Commission IST-2001-34304Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia DPI2005-0229

The Use of European Internet Communication Properties for IP Geolocation

IP Geolocation is a term used for finding the geographical location of an IP node. In this paper, we study the Internet communication properties and their use for client-independent Geolocation - finding the location without assistance of the node being located. We present and discuss the communication properties dependence on geographical aspects such as the geographical distance, differences between the source and destination country, and country population density and country ICT development index. For the study, we used a large set of data captured between the nodes geographically distributed across Europe. Based on the results, we propose an algorithm for a final location estimation within the delimited geographical area. The proposed algorithm improves the location accuracy when compared with the current techniques

An Overview of Internet Measurements:Fundamentals, Techniques, and Trends

The Internet presents great challenges to the characterization of its structure and behavior. Different reasons contribute to this situation, including a huge user community, a large range of applications, equipment heterogeneity, distributed administration, vast geographic coverage, and the dynamism that are typical of the current Internet. In order to deal with these challenges, several measurement-based approaches have been recently proposed to estimate and better understand the behavior, dynamics, and properties of the Internet. The set of these measurement-based techniques composes the Internet Measurements area of research. This overview paper covers the Internet Measurements area by presenting measurement-based tools and methods that directly influence other conventional areas, such as network design and planning, traffic engineering, quality of service, and network management

using ripe atlas for geolocating ip infrastructure

The vast majority of studies on IP geolocation focuses on localizing the end-users, and little attention has been devoted to localizing the elements of the Internet infrastructure, i.e., the routers and servers that make the Internet work. In this paper, we study the maximum theoretical accuracy that can be achieved by a geolocation approach aimed at geolocating the Internet infrastructure. In particular, we study the effects on localization accuracy produced by the position of landmarks and by the strategy followed for their enrollment. We compare two main approaches: the first is more centralized and controlled, and uses well-connected machines belonging to the infrastructure as landmarks; the second is more distributed and scalable and is based on landmarks positioned at the edge of the network. The study is based on an extensive set of measurements collected using the RIPE Atlas platform. The results show that the uniform and widespread diffusion of landmarks can be as important as their measurement accuracy. The study is carried out at both the worldwide and regional scale, including regions that were scarcely observed in the past. The results highlight that the geographical characteristics of the Internet paths are dependent on the considered region, thus suggesting the use of specifically calibrated models. Finally, the study shows that geolocating IP infrastructure with active measurements is feasible in terms of precision and scalability of the overall system

TimeWeaver: Opportunistic One Way Delay Measurement via NTP

One-way delay (OWD) between end hosts has important implications for Internet applications, protocols, and measurement-based analyses. We describe a new approach for identifying OWDs via passive measurement of Network Time Protocol (NTP) traffic. NTP traffic offers the opportunity to measure OWDs accurately and continuously from hosts throughout the Internet. Based on detailed examina- tion of NTP implementations and in-situ behavior, we develop an analysis tool that we call TimeWeaver, which enables assessment of precision and accuracy of OWD measurements from NTP. We apply TimeWeaver to a ~1TB corpus of NTP traffic collected from 19 servers located in the US and report on the characteristics of hosts and their associated OWDs, which we classify in a precision/accuracy hierarchy. To demonstrate the utility of these measurements, we apply iterative hard-threshold singular value decomposition to estimate OWDs between arbitrary hosts from the high- est tier in the hierarchy. We show that this approach results in highly accurate estimates of OWDs, with average error rates on the order of less than 2%. Finally, we outline a number of applications---in particular, IP geolocation, network operations and management---for hosts in lower tiers of the precision hierarchy that can benefit from TimeWeaver, offering directions for future work.Comment: 14 page

An IP Geolocation Approach Based on Smartphones of a Mobile Crowdsourcing System

In the recent years the attention of the scientific community has been focused on the analysis of the Internet Topology, in order to understand how the interconnections between Internet nodes works. We already know that the core of the actual Internet is a multi-tier hierarchy of IP transit providers. We also know that many reasearch project exist with the only purpose of investigating the Internet Topology. One of these project, called The Portolan Project, developed in the IT departement of the University of Pisa, is currently active and is giving a great contribution on the discovery of Internet Topology due to his bottom-up approach to the problem and the use of a mobile crowdsourcing system through Android smartphones. Another interesting field comed out in this last years is the IP Geolocation, i.e. the geographical localization of Logical IP addresses on the Internet. The motivations that focus the interest around this topic are various: the pop up of new location-aware applications like smartphones apps, web site contents and advertisement or the importance of finding the sources of malwares and viruses, or even spammers, or else academic studies on the way people use the Internet and more. There are various projects dedicated to the IP Geolocation, since it is not an easy task: there is no direct relationship between the IP address of a host and its geographic location. These projects, of academic or commercial nature, try to find a way to reach a great accuracy in the IP geolocation in order to give a full working service to the users. The contribution of this thesis is to develop an IP geolocation approach using the tools provided by the Portolan Project and the Spotter project, and to apply it in order to make the Internet Topology Analysis more complete. The experiments carried out in this thesis work will give in the future the possibility to develop a tool to geolocate IP addresses on the Internet in the Portolan Android App available to all the users