SIP Traversal Through Residential and Enterprise NATS and Firewalls

Status: Individual Internet Draft, version 02
Date of last update: July 20, 2001
Authors: J. Rosenberg, H. Schulzrinne
Current Document: draft-rosenberg-sip-entfw-02.txt
Summary: In this draft, we discuss how SIP can traverse enterprise and residential NATs. This environment is challenging because we assume here that the end user or SIP provider has no control over the NAT, and that the NAT is completely ignorant of SIP. Our approach is to make SIP "NAT friendly", with a few minor, backwards compatible extensions. These extensions allow UDP and TCP-based SIP to traverse NATs. We also handle RTP traversal using a combination of symmetric (aka connection-oriented) RTP and a new NAT detection and binding discovery mechanism. The results of the approach are that direct UDP-based RTP is used whenever provably possible in any given nat configuration. We use a network intermediary - in our case, an off- the-shelf router - to handle the case when both caller and called party are behind symmetric NATs. Our approach for binding discovery is effectively a pre-midcom solution that allows binding allocations by talking to a server behind the nat, rather than talking to the nat directly.
Archive of older drafts:
  1. Individual Draft -01, March 2001
  2. Individual Draft -00, November 2000