DOA

Woah. First thing, don't name a project DOA. Name it something better, like PANTS.

Secondly, this is 16 pages about a fairly simple idea. The diea is to generalize middleboxes in some way, dealing with all of the issues the things bring up. The most common issue is addressing machines inside of NATs, as their addresses are meaningless outside of the LAN. These guys define a new namespace that is global and flat, fudge a DNS scheme, and allow the packets to give a source routing like scheme.

This is an interesting point though. Essentially, source routing solves all of this, right? I mean, if I send a source routed packet to a NAT box, with (192.168.0.10) as the last source to route to, it would work. Assuming local DNS (such as avahi) you could make the last source be: (darth-vader) or (waterloo) and get the packet there without global naming. I suppose that the NAT will need to be addressed in some meaningful manner, but those usually are globally unique.

Huh, that might be a good idea.

Anyhow, this work was good, but it's got that "never going to be used" problem, as it requires both sides use it to get an advantage. I don't think this is inherent to the solution either, as my thing above is a slightly more reasonable version of this. For instance, a VoIP app may just broadcast a "register" packet saying "hey! I'm listening on this port for VoIP, if you get one, give it here". Then you've done some of the delegation they speak of, without the new naming scheme. You can get looked up via traditional DNS and bam, way around that punching a hole crap.

Lastly, note that skype fixed this with a big server in the real world. Both clients talk to it, and then skype tells each client what port the other has open. Doesn't work for pure P2P, unless you can negotiate a P2P node to do this for you...