Subject: [p2p-sip] Re. NAT and Overlay Maintenance

From: dedinski at fmi.uni-passau.de (Ivan Dedinski)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:25:56 +0100

Hi,

I would like to draw your attention to a concept called AVP (Active 
Virtual Peer), some work on it was published in 2003:

H. De Meer, K. Tutschku, P. Tran-Gia
Dynamic Operation of Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks
PIK (Praxis der Informationsverarbeitung und Kommunikation)
pages: 65-73, Volume: 26, No. 2, April-June 2003

The AVP concept could be eventually used to overcome the NAT problem by 
integrating some peers behind a NAT box together with globally reachable 
peers into virtual peers, which then do the overlay management. An 
advantage of this approach would be that the (few) globally reachable 
peers could gain support in terms of storage ressources and processing 
power from the (many) peers behind the NAT boxes. Also a VP instance 
behind a NAT box can easily serve the peers behind the same NAT box.

best regards

Ivan