[p2p-hackers] Final version of "P2P over NAT" paper available

[Alex Pankratov]

Bryan,

Quoting your paper -

 > .. we find that about 82% of the NATs tested support hole punching
 > for UDP.
 > ..
> The NAT Check data we gathered consists of 380 reported data points 
 > ..

I happened to have statistics for more than 16000 'data poits', and
check this out - the rate of 'identity preserving' NAT devices suitable
for hole punching works out to be 82.2%. *UDP* hole punching that is.

Alex

Bryan Ford wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> For those interested in P2P-over-NAT issues, I just wanted to announce that 
> the final version of the following paper, to appear in USENIX '05, is now 
> available:
> 
> Peer-to-Peer Communication Across Network Address Translators, Bryan Ford, 
> Pyda Srisuresh, and Dan Kegel. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, April 
> 2005.
> (PDF) http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/net/p2pnat.pdf
> (HTML) http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/net/p2pnat/
> 
> An earlier draft of this paper was announced on this list a few months ago.  
> The final version includes, among other minor revisions, new "NAT Check" 
> testing results based on almost twice the number of data points as the 
> original draft.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bryan
> 
> ---
> 
> Abstract:
> 
> Network Address Translation (NAT) causes well-known difficulties for 
> peer-to-peer (P2P) communication, since the peers involved may not be 
> reachable at any globally valid IP address. Several NAT traversal techniques 
> are known, but their documentation is slim, and data about their robustness 
> or relative merits is slimmer. This paper documents and analyzes one of the 
> simplest but most robust and practical NAT traversal techniques, commonly 
> known as ``hole punching.'' Hole punching is moderately well-understood for 
> UDP communication, but we show how it can be reliably used to set up 
> peer-to-peer TCP streams as well. After gathering data on the reliability of 
> this technique on a wide variety of deployed NATs, we find that about 82% of 
> the NATs tested support hole punching for UDP, and about 64% support hole 
> punching for TCP streams. As NAT vendors become increasingly conscious of the 
> needs of important P2P applications such as Voice over IP and online gaming 
> protocols, support for hole punching is likely to increase in the future. 
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