LEPaNTU: Long Polling Based Energy Efficient Passive NAT Traversal through UDP

Abstract

In IoT scenario, a device can be deployed in a particular environment to serve a particular purpose. It can be any smart device acting as an integral part of any smart system deployed in any environment, which requires remote supervision. To facilitate on-demand remote control of such smart systems, from any public server, that sever must be able to propagate the required signal to the appropriate devices. But, these devices are not publicly addressable as they reside behind various Network Address Translators (NAT). These devices even have energy constraints as they are battery powered. Therefore, for such devices, maintaining a TCP connection or performing repeated polling to the public server is not an energy efficient solution. This paper proposes a scheme that facilitates the server to maintain a UDP connection to the client residing behind a NAT, by dynamic determination of that NAT's translation entry lifetime and by maintaining the translation entry on that NAT through periodic keep-alives from the Server. Thus leading to an energy efficient solution towards on-demand acquiring of sensing resources for IoT based cloud services.