A structural approach for PoP geo-location

Inferring PoP level maps is gaining interest due to its importance to many areas, e.g., for tracking the Internet evolution and studying its properties. In this paper we introduce a novel structural approach to automatically generate large scale PoP level maps using traceroute measurement from multiple locations. The PoPs are first identified based on their structure, and are then assigned a location using information from several geo-location databases. We discuss the tradeoffs in this approach and provide extensive validation details. The generated maps can be widely used for research, and we provide some possible directions.