Lars Eggert said:
"A big driver for SCTP was for use a signaling protocol. Other SDOs are
using SCTP for signaling in their network architectures, and are also
now introducing NAT functionality at controlled places in these
architectures. This is why I believe and have argued that an IETF BCP
that documents how to correctly NAT SCTP is the right thing to
produce. (And, FWIW, DCCP. There's some interest in that as well, but
not such an immediate one as for SCTP.) As a SIP-area person, this
mode of operation should be familiar to you.
Will this BCP make SCTP available behind a home NAT? Nope. But it
provides a specification that people can refer to who design network
architectures that are more tightly controlled than the end user
Internet, i.e., where people can define and then require their NATs to
have this functionality."
I agree with Lars here -- having a specification is the first step.
However, I would suspect that clearly specifying how SCTP and DCCP
work with NAT would eventually make it possible to obtain a home NAT
supporting those protocols, particularly if implementations were made
available within the popular distributions (e.g. DD-WRT) on which those
home NATs are frequently based.
On another note, I think it makes a difference whether UDP/TCP is combined
with IP at the waist, or whether UDP/TCP is considered a lower layer on
which IP, etc. can run. That is, whether we have general NAT traversal
mechanisms which support a wide array of applications, or whether we end
up having to modify each individual protocol. The draft seems to suggest
the latter approach. I disagree.
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