Location Accuracy of Commercial IP Address Geolocation Databases

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