In this paper we take the position that current research in the area of distributed systems has all but forgotten about one of the largest collective Internet resources - the NATed node. These are hosts that are behind Network Address Translation (NAT) gateways and are hidden by the fact that they have private IP addresses. We argue that Distributed-Hash Tables [18], P2P systems [5], and Grid Computing[9] could greatly benefit by tapping into this forgotten pool of resources. Also, we give an outline of a service, the Distributed-Hash Queue (DHQ), that can enable these NATed resources to be exploited.
Chad Yoshikawa, Brent N. Chun, Amin Vahdat, Fred S