Mahesh Balakrishnan
ABSTRACT
Cell phones connected to high-speed 3G networks constitute an increasingly important class of clients on the Internet. From the viewpoint of the servers they connect to, such devices are virtually indistinguishable from conventional end-hosts. In this study, we examine the IP addresses seen by Internet servers for cell phone clients and make two observations. First, individual cell phones can expose different IP addresses to servers within time spans of a few minutes, rendering IP-based user identification and blocking inadequate. Second, cell phone IP addresses do not embed geographical information at reasonable fidelity, reducing the effectiveness of commercial geolocation tools used by websites for fraud detection, server selection and content customization. In addition to these two observations, we show that application-level latencies between cell phones and Internet servers can differ greatly depending on the location of the cell phone, but do not vary much at a given location over short time spans; as a result, they provide fine-grained location information that IPs do not.
- http://www.ip2location.com.Google Scholar
- http://www.maxmind.com.Google Scholar
- http://www.quova.com.Google Scholar
- http://www.google.com/mobile/gmm/mylocation.Google Scholar
- P. V. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan. RADAR: An in-building RF-based user location and tracking system. In INFOCOM 2000, Tel-Aviv, Israel.Google ScholarCross Ref
- M. Casado and M. J. Freedman. Peering through the shroud: The effect of edge opacity on IP-based client identification. In NSDI 2007: Fourth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Cambridge, MA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Hofmann-Wellenhof, H. Lichtenegger, and J. Collins. Global Positioning System: Theory and Practice. Springer-Verlag, 3rd edition, 2001.Google Scholar
- A. Hopper, A. Harter, and T. Blackie. The active badge system. In Proc of the INTERCHI Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1993. Google ScholarDigital Library
- V. N. Padmanabhan and L. Subramanian. An investigation of geographic mapping techniques for Internet hosts. In ACM SIGCOMM 2001, San Diego, CA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. B. Priyantha, A. Chakraborty, and H. Balakrishnan. The Cricket location-support system. In MobiCom 2000: ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Boston, MA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Varshavsky, E. de Lara, A. LaMarca, J. Hightower, and V. Otsason. Gsm indoor localization. Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal (PMC), 3(6):698--720, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Wong, I. Stoyanov, and E. G. Sirer. Octant: A comprehensive framework for the geolocalization of Internet hosts. In NSDI 2007: Fourth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Cambridge, MA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Xie, F. Yu, K. Achan, E. Gillum, M. Goldszmidt, and T. Wobber. How dynamic are ip addresses? In ACM SIGCOMM 2007, Kyoto, Japan. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Where's that phone?: geolocating IP addresses on 3G networks
Recommendations
IP Geolocation with a Crowd-sourcing Broadband Performance Tool
In this paper, we propose an IP geolocation DB creation method based on a crowd-sourcing Internet broadband performance measurement tagged with locations and present an IP geolocation DB based on 7 years of Internet broadband performance data in Korea. ...
Mapping the Internet: Geolocating Routers by Using Machine Learning
COMGEO '13: Proceedings of the 2013 Fourth International Conference on Computing for Geospatial Research and ApplicationKnowing the geolocation of a router can help to predict the geolocation of an Internet user, which is important for local advertising, fraud detection, and geo-fencing applications. For example, the geolocation of the last router on the path to a user ...
Investigating the imprecision of IP block-based geolocation
PAM'07: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Passive and active network measurementThe lack of adoption of a DNS-based geographic location service as proposed in RFC 1876 has lead to the deployment of alternative ways to locate Internet hosts. The two main alternatives rely either on active probing of individual hosts or on doing ...
Reviews
Rogier Noldus
This is an interesting paper on a relevant topic. The authors nicely present the problem, and then back it up with measurement results. The paper does not thoroughly explain why Internet protocol (IP) addresses for third-generation (3G) phones seem to be ephemeral and itinerant. It addresses neither the cause of this nor possible resolutions. First, the paper concludes that it is inaccurate to base the location of a phone on its IP address. Next, it delves into latency measurements and analysis, using latency to determine location. Unfortunately, the paper fails to theoretically explain why latency has a small variance over time, for a phone that remains in a particular location, and how this may be used to determine or estimate the location. Looking to the future, will such a mechanism also be accurate for evolved 3G networks, which differ in architecture from contemporary 3G networks__?__ There are many ongoing developments in radio networks, core networks, and applications that may result in changes in latency. Overall, the paper provides insight and interesting measurement results. It will definitely entice many readers to perform further research in this area. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments