A widely used technique to overcome the shortage of unique public IP addresses is Network Address Translation (NAT), which hides several hosts behind a single public address. This method works smoothly with client-server architectures; however, it causes severe problems with the peerto-peer (p2p) communication paradigm. Due to the side effects of NAT, the establishing connection is made possible only by using special NAT traversal techniques. This paper presents a lightweight framework for NAT traversal, which smoothly integrates with p2p applications. The framework can be easily used by most p2p applications, is extensible and does not require additional maintenance overhead.
Konstantin Pussep, M. Weinert, Aleksandra Kovacevi