[zeromq-dev] Routers and Nats Question

[Daniel Holth]

According to this diagram
https://developers.google.com/talk/libjingle/important_concepts#candidates
8% of their connections would have to transfer data through a relay
server (but many applications will say 'no' at this point because it
is expensive). This study from 2005
(http://nutss.gforge.cis.cornell.edu/pub/imc05-tcpnat.pdf) estimates
an 11% failure rate, but when the connection succeeds your STUN server
handles only the much smaller amount of traffic needed to establish a
direct connection through the NAT devices.

Seems like you might need to know about individual TCP connections at
a lower level than you get from ZeroMQ.

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Brian Duffy <brduffy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Okay, I read up on Nat traversal (interesting). One more question; is it
> worth it? Assuming I am developing an application that would need to handle
> port forwarding automatically for users that are not expected to interact
> with their routers settings, I am concerned about the drawbacks of Nat
> traversal. Specifically, I don't know how many routers might support upnp or
> nat-pmp by default, and I don't know if enough routers will be configured in
> such a way that STUN will be effective. Also, I really don't want an
> external server in my implementation if I can help it. I may just decide to
> implement some local blue tooth networking and write a mobile app so that
> users can atleast share some data in a personal area network and then sync
> back to the clients when in range, but I would be interested in peoples
> opinions on implementing automatic port forwarding in their applications and
> what luck they may or may not have had.