TRIAD provides end-to-end semantics across NAT boundaries, allowing for secure and reliable communication while providing all the benefits of NAT. As mentioned in the introduction, NAT is valuable for address assignment autonomy, flexible multi-homing, concealing the internal addressing of an organization, and transparent redirect as with virtual hosts.
TRIAD extends IP addressing,
allowing the Internet to scale arbitrarily
without having to make the painful transition to IPv6
.
This extended addressing also allows TRIAD to support VPNs
without having to upgrade all routers to support MPLS
or incur the full overhead of tunneling.
Similarly, it supports policy-based routing across realms
and the extended forwarding path check
as a scalable extension of the RPF check.
TRIAD provides a reliable integrated directory service, allowing all identification to be based on user-assigned names without compromising reliability. These names are used for authentication, making what is used by applications and what is secured the same, in contrast to IPsec. In addition, the TRIAD directory service supports multicast channel naming, mobility, policy-based routing and DNS-level load balancing, removing the complexity of these facilities from the network layer.
TRIAD provides trusted reverse name lookup, at least to the extent the receiver can trust the packet.
TRIAD incurs a lower space and time overhead for communication on average because communication within a realm just uses the conventional IPv4 header. Given that most communication is local and the current Internet with NAT boxes is effectively at most 3 relay agents to anywhere, the packet header overhead on average is expected to be significantly less with WRAP than with IPv6. This header overhead is significant because most packets are small and per-packet processing is a significant cost with small packets. This optimized local communication also suits small embedded systems, many of which use or will use limited bandwidth wireless communication. Moreover, it is readily hardware implementable because of the size of relay address to lookup can be fixed size.
Finally, TRIAD is readily deployable incrementally as outlined in the previous section. There is no need to change the network infrastructure within an address realm or to change backbone routers and management. The boundary (NAT) routers are upgraded to support TRIAD and then the hosts can then be individually upgraded to use WRAP natively.