Patent attributes
Systems and methods of the present disclosure provide techniques to locate target devices. An electronic message is sent to a set of landmark devices, signaling each landmark device to transmit echo-request packets to a target device and to other landmark devices and measure network-communication delays. Indications of the network-communication delays are received from the set landmark devices. A first sequence is formed by sorting the set of landmark devices relative to the network-communication delays between the target device and each landmark device. For each respective landmark device, an additional sequence is formed by sorting other landmark devices relative to the network-communication delays between the respective landmark device and the other landmark devices. A sequence-matching operation is applied to the first sequence and the additional sequences to form a ranking of the set of landmark devices relative to the target device.