ANTS - A Framework for Knowledge Based NAT Traversal

Today most home networks are connected to the Internet via Network Address Translation (NAT) devices. NAT is an obstacle for services that should be accessible from the public Internet. Especially applications following the peer-to-peer paradigm suffer from the existence of NAT. Various NAT Traversal methods emerged in research and standardization, but none of them can claim to be a general solution working in the heterogeneous environment of today´s networks. This paper introduces the Advanced NAT Traversal Service (ANTS), a framework improving the communication of existing and future applications across NAT devices. The core idea of ANTS is to use previously acquired knowledge about NAT behavior and services for setting up new connections. We introduce the architecture of the extensible framework and propose a signaling protocol for the coordination of distributed instances. Finally, we compare the framework to ICE showing that ANTS is not only more flexible, but also faster due to the decoupled connectivity checks.