Mass Adoption of NATs: Survey and experiments on carrier-grade NATs

In recent times, the prevalence of home NATs and the widespread implementation of Carrier-Grade NATs have posed significant challenges to various applications, particularly those relying on Peer-to-Peer communication. This paper addresses these issues by conducting a thorough review of related literature and exploring potential techniques to mitigate the problems. The literature review focuses on the disruptive effects of home NATs and CGNATs on application performance. Additionally, the study examines existing approaches used to alleviate these disruptions. Furthermore, this paper presents a comprehensive guide on how to puncture a NAT and facilitate direct communication between two peers behind any type of NAT. The techniques outlined in the guide are rigorously tested using a simple application running the IPv8 network overlay, along with their built-in NAT penetration procedures. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, 5G communication is established between two phones using four different Dutch telephone carriers. The results indicate successful cross-connectivity with three out of the four carriers tested, showcasing the practical applicability of the suggested methods.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Automatically Testing a Conversational Crowd Computing Platform

The rise in the use of crowd computing platforms led to the birth of Dandelion, a conversational crowd computing platform developed at TU Delft with the main goals being to connect students with researchers and to allow students to report on their well-being by using a friendly interface. Dandelion was tested manually up to the time of drafting this paper; thus, the primary motivation behind this paper is to ensure the robustness and measure the responsiveness of Dandelion.Robustness was exercised by utilizing a simulated user behaving unexpectedly. The testing framework then classifies the behaviour of Dandelion according to the C.R.A.S.H. scale. The testing framework is validated by altering Dandelion's behaviour and ensuring that the test results reflect the change. Furthermore, a lower bound to the run time of a task will be estimated using a Multi-Agent System (M.A.S.) simulation on Dandelion.Upon verifying the correctness of the robustness test, a faulty assumption was uncovered on which the user's input validation was based. Furthermore, the M.A.S. simulation run estimated a lower bound of $\approx 5.788$ seconds, while revealing a lack of user's input validation before posting them in the database.CSE3000 Research ProjectComputer Science and Engineerin