URL Forwarding for NAT Traversal

Rapid technological advancement has induced widespread adoption of smart, powerful and multi-purpose end-user devices (e.g., phones, tablets, set-top boxes, gaming console etc.) in our daily life. Unfortunately, the available mechanisms for accessing, configuring and controlling these devices are still primitive, and require physical access to the devices. Enabling remote access to these devices through a widely used protocol, such as HTTP, can significantly improve their usability and can foster innovative applications. However, the end-devices are often NATed by home gateways, which is not suitable for HTTP access over the Internet. In this work, we present a mechanism for seamless traversal of HTTP traffic through home gateways. Our approach builds upon the existing Web-technology. It allows remote access using global DNS names, despite the end-devices having local IPs. As a proof of concept, we realize the proposed architecture on the well-accepted OpenWRT platform, and report experimental results on device access performance.