The lonely NATed node

Abstract

In this paper we take the position that current research in the area of distributed systems has all but forgotten about one of the largest collective Internet resources - the NATed node. These are hosts that are behind Network Address Translation (NAT) gateways and are hidden by the fact that they have private IP addresses. We argue that Distributed-Hash Tables [20], P2P systems [6], and Grid Computing [10] could greatly benefit by tapping into this forgotten pool of resources. Also, we give an outline of a service, the Distributed-Hash Queue (DHQ), that can enable these NATed resources to be exploited.