meridian Octant
A Framework for the Geolocation of Internet Hosts

Octant is a novel, comprehensive framework for determining the physical location of Internet nodes. It breaks down the geolocation problem into a system of constraints that can be solved geometrically to yield an estimated region where the node resides. Constraints are aggressively derived from network measurements from landmarks and intermediate nodes whose locations are known. This approach gains its accuracy through three novel properties. First, it takes advantage of negative information, that is information on where a node is not, in addition to positive information, that is, information on where the node might be. Second it can reason in the presence of uncertainity, which enables it to extract geographic constraints from routers on the network path whose positions are not known precisely. Finally, Octant is a general framework that can admit any kind of constraint through its representation of constraints as surfaces bounded by Bezier curves. The framework can localize the median PlanetLab node to within 22 miles, a factor of three better than previouis approaches, with little error.


->  Overview How Octant works.
->  Papers Paper trail.
->  Online Demo A PlanetLab deployment consisting of 40 landmarks nodes is available for evaluation.
->  Screenshots Check out screenshots of some interesting targets localized by Octant.
->  People Project members.
->  Support Our sources of research support.

Octant Project

Computer Science Department
Cornell University