A Multi-perspective Analysis of Carrier-Grade NAT Deployment
- 14 November 2016
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- p. 215-229
- https://doi.org/10.1145/2987443.2987474
Abstract
As ISPs face IPv4 address scarcity they increasingly turn to network address translation (NAT) to accommodate the address needs of their customers. Recently, ISPs have moved beyond employing NATs only directly at individual customers and instead begun deploying Carrier-Grade NATs (CGNs) to apply address translation to many independent and disparate endpoints spanning physical locations, a phenomenon that so far has received little in the way of empirical assessment. In this work we present a broad and systematic study of the deployment and behavior of these middleboxes. We develop a methodology to detect the existence of hosts behind CGNs by extracting non-routable IP addresses from peer lists we obtain by crawling the BitTorrent DHT. We complement this approach with improvements to our Netalyzr troubleshooting service, enabling us to determine a range of indicators of CGN presence as well as detailed insights into key properties of CGNs. Combining the two data sources we illustrate the scope of CGN deployment on today's Internet, and report on characteristics of commonly deployed CGNs and their effect on end users.Keywords
Other Versions
Funding Information
- National Science Foundation (CNS-1111672, CNS-1213157)
- Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (16KIS0411)
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FKZ FE 570/4-1)
This publication has 33 references indexed in Scilit:
- A Primer on IPv4 ScarcityACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2015
- Measuring IPv6 adoptionACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2014
- On the Impact of Mobile Network Delays on Connection Establishment Performance of a Carrier Grade NAT DevicePublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2014
- Analysis and topology-based traversal of cascaded large scale NATsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2013
- IPv4 Address Sharing Mechanism Classification and Tradeoff AnalysisIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2013
- Probe and Pray: Using UPnP for Home Network MeasurementsLecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
- Understanding website complexityPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2011
- An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networksPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2011
- NAT Usage in Residential Broadband NetworksLecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
- Kademlia: A Peer-to-Peer Information System Based on the XOR MetricLecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002