IPv6 geolocation using latency constraints

Abstract

IPv4 addresses are now exhausted, and as a result, the growth of IPv6 addresses has increased significantly since 2010. The rate of increase of IPv6 usage is expected to continue; thus the need to determine the geographic location of IPv6 hosts will grow to support location-aware applications. Examples of services that require or benefit from IPv6 geolocation include overlay networks, location-based security mechanisms, client language and policy determination, and location targeted advertising. Internet protocol (IP) geolocation is the process of obtaining the geographical location of a device or host using only the host’s IP address. This study looked at using constraint-based geolocation (CBG), a latency-based measurement technique, on IPv6 infrastructure and analyzed location accuracy against ground truth. Results show that overall IPv6 CBG had up to 30% larger average error distance estimates as compared to IPv4 CBG. However, CBG performance varied depending on the location of the target host. Hosts located in the Asia-Pacific region performed the worst, while hosts located in Europe had the best performance in median error distance. AS-level path differences between IPv4 and IPv6 and the number of landmarks had the most significant impact on CBG performance.