TCPBridge: A software approach to establish direct communications for NAT hosts

Traversing Network Address Translation (NAT) for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication has become a hot topic recently. Compared to UDP, establishing TCP connections for hosts behind different NATs is more complex. Thus, many TCP-based applications do not address TCP traversal through NATs. Some solution...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2008 IEEE/ACS International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications pp. 247 - 252
Main Authors: Sanmin Liu, Jin, Hai, Xiaofei Liao, Hong Yao, Deze Zeng
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.03.2008
Subjects:
Application software
Communication system software
Computer science
Grid computing
Network address translation
Peer to peer computing
Protocols
Punching
Robustness
TCPIP
ISBN:9781424419678, 1424419670
ISSN:2161-5322
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Traversing Network Address Translation (NAT) for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication has become a hot topic recently. Compared to UDP, establishing TCP connections for hosts behind different NATs is more complex. Thus, many TCP-based applications do not address TCP traversal through NATs. Some solutions suggest using delegates to relay all communications, or tunneling TCP over UDP. However, they require a big reform to network architecture, or using a non-standard TCP/IP stack. In this paper, we present a novel idea called TCPBridge. TCPBridge converts TCP traversal to UDP traversal without modifying any binaries of the TCP-based applications. Our design can be integrated with those P2P applications which have not solved TCP traversal problem, and extends them to support direct communications between NAT hosts. It deals with the problem of TCP traversal, so as to improve the usability of applications. We have implemented TCPBridge in several existing P2P systems. Statistics prove that TCPBridge is scalable and robust, and we believe it will benefit many other existing P2P applications.
ISBN:9781424419678
1424419670
ISSN:2161-5322
DOI:10.1109/AICCSA.2008.4493542