Drop: Dns-Based Router Positioning

In this paper we focus on geolocating Internet routers, using a methodology for extracting and decoding geography-related strings from fully qualified domain names (hostnames). We first compiled an extensive dictionary associating geographic strings (e.g., airport codes) with geophysical locations. We then searched a large set of router hostnames for these strings, assuming each autonomous naming domain uses geographic hints consistently within that domain. We used topology and performance data continually collected by our global measurement infrastructure to discern whether a given hint appears to co-locate different hostnames in which it is found. Finally, we generalized geolocation hints into domain-specific rule sets. We generated a total of 1,711 rules covering 1,398 different domains and validated them using domain-specific ground truth we gathered for six domains. Unlike previous efforts which relied on labor-intensive domain-specific manual analysis, we automate our process for inferring the domain specific heuristics, substantially advancing the state-of-the-art of methods for geolocating Internet resources.