Abstract

Network Address Translation (NAT) is one of the most widely-used Ad-hoc techniques in the world. Its soul purpose has been the effective utilisation of IPv4 public addresses by enabling the sharing of a single (or few) IPv4 address(es) by a large number of nodes within a private network. Since its inception, it has achieved a wide-scale adoption worldwide. Unfortunately, it imposes a great obstacle with respect to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications. To address this issue, different NAT traversal techniques have been proposed. This paper presents a survey of different NAT traversal techniques from classical solutions to non-standardized solutions. For each technique, their mechanisms, strengths and limitations are explored. Finally, this paper presents the findings in tabular formats so as to provide a side-by-side comparison of different NAT traversal techniques.

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