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At the moment, NAT means that lots of connections have to go through a central server, at least to set up the connection. With IPv6, that need should vanish (providing you aren't firewalled by your router).

The two things combined should remove a lot of middlemen.



Actually check out the webrtc talk from googleio. They use the NAT device's IP to get around this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8C8ouiXHHk


Exactly. Almost everyone is behind a router so there is no way this is going to be as useful as stated in the article.


P2P firewall traversal is pretty common these days. Checkout STUN/ICE/TURN.


I stand corrected :). I was just reading up on STUN, it is a very interesting solution.


Every example I'm aware of for WebRTC right now uses STUN. It's part of ROAP and it's possible in JSEP (and easier, with ROAP-via-JSEP library).

Nah, everyone is just claiming this to be awesome and just happened to forget about NAT routers....


IPv6 does not mean the end of NAT, and WebRTC ROAP or JSEP already have ICE style STUN/TURN traversal mechanisms.

(4 months ago I had a demo working using ROAP and STUN before they switched to JSEP. I'm literally in the middle of upgrading it to the new API.)

The "setup" for the connections in the central server is trivial with a tiny websockets server and a few messages shuttled back and forth.


For reference for others:

NAT (Network Address Traversal): exposing only your router's ip address and hiding your own to outside traffic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation]

ROAP (RTCWeb Offer/Answer Protocol): main voice protocol [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTCWeb_Offer/Answer_Protocol]

JSEP (JavaScript Session Establishment Protocol): protocol for setting up P2P connection [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Session_Establishme...]

Following are all technologies for punching through NAT...

ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Connectivity_Estab...]

STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN]

TURN (Traversal Using Relays around NAT): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relay_NAT]

(Disclaimer: I know nothing of these technologies, I just looked them up on wikipedia myself)


Holy acroynm city batman.




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