Network Address Translation for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol

Network address translation is widely deployed in the Internet and supports the Transmission Control Protocol and the User Datagram Protocol as transport layer protocols. Although part of the kernels of all recent Linux distributions, namely, the FreeBSD 7 and the Solaris 10 operating systems, the new Internet Engineering Task Force transport protocol - Stream Control Transmission Protocol - is not supported on most NAT middleboxes yet. This article discusses the deficiencies of using existing NAT methods for SCTP and describes a new SCTP-specific NAT concept. This concept is analyzed in detail for several important network scenarios, including peer-to-peer, transport layer mobility, and multihoming.