https://www.voip-info.org/routers-sip-alg

Routers SIP ALG

Introduction

Many of today’s commercial routers implement SIP ALG (Application-level gateway), coming with this feature enabled by default. While ALG could help in solving NAT related problems, the fact is that many routers’ ALG implementations are wrong and break SIP.

There are various solutions for SIP clients behind NAT, some of them in client side (STUN, TURN, ICE), others in server side (Proxy RTP as RtpProxy, MediaProxy). ALG works typically in the client LAN router or gateway. In some scenarios some client side solutions are not valid, for example STUN with symmetrical NAT router. If the SIP proxy doesn’t provide a server side NAT solution, then an ALG solution could have a place.

An ALG understands the protocol used by the specific applications that it supports (in this case SIP) and does a protocol packet-inspection of traffic through it. A NAT router with a built-in SIP ALG can re-write information within the SIP messages (SIP headers and SDP body) making signaling and audio traffic between the client behind NAT and the SIP endpoint possible.