This article is part of the series Intelligent Systems for Future Generation Wireless Networks.

Open Access Research Article

NAT Traversing Solutions for SIP Applications

Whai-En Chen1, Ya-Lin Huang2 and Han-Chieh Chao1,3,4*

Author Affiliations

1 Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National I-Lan University, I-Lan 260, Taiwan

2 Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan

3 Department of Electronic Engineering, National I-Lan University, I-Lan 260, Taiwan

4 Department of Electrical Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien 974, Taiwan

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EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2008, 2008:639528 doi:10.1155/2008/639528


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2008/1/639528


Received:2 January 2008
Accepted:2 March 2008
Published:31 March 2008

© 2008 The Author(s)

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has been proposed for multimedia services and wide-area connectivity in smart home environments (SHEs). An important issue for SIP deployment in SHEs is network address translator (NAT) traversing. SIP and Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) packets are delivered between an SHE (i.e., private IP network) and Internet (i.e., a public IP network) through an NAT function of a home gateway, and the NAT translates the IP/transport layer address and port number but leaves the application layer content unchanged. This results in inconsistency between the IP addresses/port numbers in the IP/transport layers and those in the SIP layer. To resolve this issue, we describe six solutions including static route, UPnP, STUN, ICE, ALG, and SBC. Then we compare these solutions in terms of smart home appliance (SHA) modification, scope of NATs supported, multilayer NAT traversal, ease of configuration, security issue, and time complexities.

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