The NAT Foundation-Basic/Traditional NAT

NAT enables hosts with RFC 1918 addresses to access officially routed Internet IPv4 addresses, but it also can be deployed for migration scenarios with overlapping address space. RFC 3022 exhaustively describes the evolution of NAT variants and is highly recommended reading. In the most general case (basic NAT), inside RFC 1918 private address pools are mapped to outside address pools that are transparent to end users. The original approach featured a 1:1 mapping from internal to external addresses, which by itself did not provide address preservation. The introduction of Network Address Port Translation (NAPT or PAT) changed this picture in a way?that is, via TCP/UDP ports, many internal addresses can be mapped into one outside address. This is also referred to as port multiplexing.

NAT gateways store information that is relevant for mapping/reverse mapping in state tables. NAT/PAT mappings come in several flavors:

• One-to-one or bidirectional mapping (1:1) (static mappings)

• One-to-many (1:n) (single gateway address = NAPT/PAT/masquerading or dynamic NAT)

• Many-to-many (n:m) (NAT address pools)