Autonomous NAT Traversal

Traditional NAT traversal methods require the help of a third party for signalling. This paper investigates a new autonomous method for establishing connections to peers behind NAT. The proposed method for autonomous NAT traversal uses fake ICMP messages to initially contact the NATed peer. This paper presents how the method is supposed to work in theory, discusses some possible variations, introduces various concrete implementations of the proposed approach and evaluates empirical results of a measurement study designed to evaluate the efficacy of the idea in practice.