ACSP Suggestion 2007.9: Meetme Service

Suggestion

Author: Michael Dillon   
Submitted On: 21 March 2007

Description:

Run a meetme service that applications can use to break through NATs. For instance, I boot my machine in a hotel room and my voice-conferencing app tells the ARIN meetme service where I am. If someone calls me, their app asks the meetme service how to reach me which tells them what to do. Maybe they can send packets to a specific port on the hotel’s NAT gateway. Maybe they can send packets to my hosted relay server in Germany. Or maybe they can relay a connect request to me via the meetme server and my app will call back. The point of course, is to facilitate NAT without needing every protocol to come up with STUN-alikes (Google SIP STUN). And facilitating NAT means fewer registered IPv4 addresses are needed. A meetme service like this needs to have servers as widespread as the DNS roots, i.e. all over the world are major traffic interchanges. It doesn’t work as a commercial product because there needs to be ONE service in the infrastructure, like DNS.

This needs to be done in phases, i.e. proof of concept in one year, etc.

Timeframe: one-year

Status: Completed   Updated: 19 April 2007

Tracking Information

ARIN Comment

19 April 2007

With regards to the suggestion of ARIN facilitating a Meetme service, this is outside the scope of ARIN’s mission and supporting services.

Suggestion 2007.9 is now closed.