GCN-Geo: A Graph Convolution Network-based Fine-grained IP Geolocation Framework
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Classical fine-grained measurement-based IP geolocation algorithms often rely on some specific linear delay-distance rules. This could cause unreliable geolocation results in actual network environments where the delay-distance relationship is non-linear. Recently, researchers begin to pay attention to learning-based IP geolocation algorithms. These data-driven algorithms leverage multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to model the network environments. They do not need strong pre-assumptions about the linear delay-distance rule and are capable to learn non-linear relationships. In theory, they should improve the generalization ability of IP geolocation in different networks. However, networks are fundamentally represented as graphs. MLP is not well suited to model information structured as graphs. MLP-based IP geolocation methods treat target IP addresses as isolated data instances and ignore the connection information between targets. This would lead to suboptimal representations and limit the geolocation performance. Graph convolutional network (GCN) is an emerging deep learning method for graph data presentation. In this work, we research how to model computer networks for fine-grained IP geolocation with GCN. First, we formulate the IP geolocation task as an attributed graph node regression problem. Then, a GCN-based IP geolocation framework named GCN-Geo is proposed to predict the location of each IP address. Finally, the experimental results in three real-world datasets (New York State, Hong Kong, and Shanghai) show that the proposed GCN-Geo framework clearly outperforms the state-of-art rule-based and learning-based baselines on average error distance, median error distance and max error distance. This verifies the potential of GCN in fine-grained IP geolocation.
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