Location accuracy of commercial IP address geolocation databases

Abstract

This paper deals with finding the geographical location of Internet nodes remotely with no need to communicate with the nodes located (client-independently). IP geolocation is used in a number of areas, such as content personalisation, on-line fraud prevention and detection, and digital media law enforcement. One of the main concerns when studying the accuracy of client-independent geolocation is the groundtruth dataset. As we show in the related work, the used groundtruth influences the results a lot. We construct an error-free groundtruth dataset consisting of nodes with GPS-precise locations. We also record the country, region, city, and ISP for each groundtruth node. Using the created groundtruth, we study the accuracy of eight IP location databases in a number of scenarios, such as effect of city area and population, effect of ISP assignment, and number of not-returned locations.