On NAT Traversal in Peer-to-Peer Applications
Key: PKS08-1
Author: Konstantin Pussep, Matthias Weinert, Aleksandra Kovacevic, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: June 2008
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: IEEE Computer Society Press
Book title: 17th Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE 2008)
Keywords: peer-to-peer, NAT, framework
Abstract: The enormous increase in Internet usage in recent years has caused a shortage of unique public IP addresses. A widely used technique to solve this problem is Network Address Translation (NAT); this technique provides Internet connectivity for an arbitrary number of hosts by hiding several hosts behind a single public address. This method works smoothly with clientserver architectures, however, it causes severe problems with the peer-to-peer (p2p) communication paradigm. Due to the side effects of NAT, the connection establishment is only possible by using special methods called NAT traversal techniques. This paper presents a lightweight framework for NAT traversal, which smoothly integrates with p2p applications. The framework contains the most important of NAT traversal techniques and makes it easily possible to establish connections with hidden peers. Moreover, the framework can be easily extended with other traversal techniques without changing the application itself.
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