Ask HN: How does FaceTime do NAT Traversal?

7 points by gr3g 15y ago ↗ HN

I've been researching on several NAT Traversal algorithms for project I'm working on. I tried FaceTime on several routers with different NAT configurations and it seemed to work great but couldn't figure out the algorithm. Any help will be much appreciated.

4 comments

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DanWaterworth 15y ago ↗

The usual technique is 'UDP hole punching'.

rycs 15y ago ↗

yeah, same thing Skype does, I would not be surprised if FaceTime does exactly that.

mryan 15y ago ↗

STUN and TURN are listed in the open source protocols used by FaceTime [1], so it is probably one or both of those. There are probably a few more methods too, and it will just keep trying until it finds one that works on the current network.

[1] http://blog.imtc.org/index.php/2010/06/09/the-technology-beh...

st3fan 15y ago ↗

STUN and TURN were already mentioned.

There is also Apple's own NAT-PMP which is more like UPnP but simpler. It can directly ask your (Apple) router to open a port and redirect it incoming traffic to a specific IP address on your local network.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapp...

I bet Apple also supports UPnP these days.