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Asked: 2026-05-23T10:39:14+00:00

I have a C++ application that currently uses a simple TCP/IP client/server model to

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I have a C++ application that currently uses a simple TCP/IP client/server model to communicate between 2 instances of itself. This works fine on a local network, but I would like this to be used across an external network. Currently, maybe due to firewall issues, it is not able to connect across an external network.

I am not an expert on networking, but I was thinking about having a dedicated server in the middle acting as a hub for communications. Will this mitigate firewall issues?

How do networked games communicate with each other? Is there usually a server in the middle or is it peer-to-peer?

In any case, I’d appreciate any advice on protocols and infrastructure to implement a network enabled application.

Regards

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  1. Editorial Team

    The bane of modern internet communications is NAT. Due to NAT (which shouldn’t be confused with a simple firewall) a large portion of hosts on the internet don’t have a public address and thus can’t (easily) accept incoming connections. NAT breaks the internet so badly that people are moving to a totally different scheme, with slightly different semantics, just to get rid of it.

    There are basically two class of solutions

    • NAT traversal which is sometimes used for peer-to-peer communication. Usually NAT traversal schemes require some publicly accessible server for brokering the initial connection, but the actual communication is done peer-to-peer

    • Client-server communication. This is easier (since the server generally should have a publicly accessible address) but also kind of inefficient. For instance, say you’ve got a peer on the same 10Gb LAN. If you want to send him a file through the server (which happens to be in another country) it’s going to take ages instead of seconds.

    I’m not sure which one is “generally used”. But think of it this way:

    • If there is the logical need for a “controller” (say 8 people are playing a strategy game) then you probably need a server
    • If any two peers can logically interact without a “controller”, you probably want peer-to-peer communication
    • If you need to transfer LOTS of data fast (file transfer), you almost surely want p2p.
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