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NAT is short for Network Address Translation, and provides a way
for an embedded system to translate the IP addresses used by the
TCP/IP stack. This means that several computers in a network can
share one globally unique IP address, which is translated to local
addresses by means of NAT. Embedded NAT does not only reduce the
requirement for globally unique IP addresses, but also introduces
other advantages such as network management simplification and network
security enhancements.
Since the number of devices connected to the Internet has grown
rapidly over the past few years, network managers today have to
face problems the original designers probably never considered when
they first developed the TCP/IP protocol in the 70's. One of the
emerging problems is the lack of unique IP addresses. The Internet
protocol in its current version theoretically limits the number
of connected hosts to 4 billion, but the practical limit is much
less. In fact, shortage in the Internet address space was one of
the reasons to why a complete redesign of the protocol was started,
known as IPv6.
Interpeak NAT is optimized for deployment in embedded systems,
and delivered in ANSI compliant C source code with ready-to-run
RTOS integration containing makefiles etc.
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