A continuously increasing demand for Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses was somethingthat was not considered at the time when the Internet was first designed. The argumentwas actually quite the opposite and most experts pooh-poohed the idea of theinternet ever growing to beyond 100,000 networks. However, the 100,000th networkwas connected to the internet in 1996 (Tanenbaum 2003). The Explosive growth of theInternet has resulted in a shortage of the number of available IP Addresses. As thisgrowth continues the shortage will increase and a new form of Internet Addressing willneed to be established. The current form, IPv6 has been under development for sometime now and has not gathered wide industry support. Obviously a temporary solutionmust be established to overcome the shortage of IP Addresses in the immediate futureuntil permanent solutions can be achieved.On the other hand the TCP Protocol was established as an end-to-end connection forreliable communication and makes use of its own 16-bit port number. This allows forup to 65,535 unique port numbers for TCP communication. Most hosts never maintain65,535 end-to-end connections and this allows for a technology called Network AddressTranslation (NAT) to save on the number of IP Addresses required on the Internet bymultiplexing many IP Sources onto one or more IP Addresses using unique TCP portnumbers for each data stream.The ultimate aim of this project is to produce a small prototype Network AddressTranslator and discuss further improvements necessary for its use in a productionenvironment.
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