Technical Summary
The Port Control Protocol allows an IPv6 or IPv4 host to control how
incoming IPv6 or IPv4 packets are translated and forwarded by a network
address translator (NAT) or simple firewall, and also allows a host to
optimize its outgoing NAT keepalive messages.
Working Group Summary
At the outset, the WG looked at many other protocols that have been
proposed in the past for doing similar things, but almost none have
been successful in getting real deployment. The exceptions are NAT-PMP
and UPnP-IGD. Between them, the WG concluded that NAT-PMP was more
closely aligned with the intended scenarios and hence used NAT-PMP
as the starting point for PCP.
Document Quality
Several PCP implementations exist, and some interoperability testing
has already been done.
Margaret Wasserman did a thorough security analysis and wrote the
security considerations section.
Many others (beyond the authors themselves), including a number of
implementers, have also done reviews and are acknowledged in the document.
Personnel
The Document Shepherd is Dave Thaler and the responsible
Area Director is Ralph Droms.