Unit One Project
Heidar Alshabany
IT 535
Kaplan University
May 13, 2014

Unit One Project
Network address Translation (NAT) is a technology that can be used by network administrators to configure IP addresses of network communication. NAT permits a network device like a router to act as an agent between public and private networks. NAT provides the capability for enterprises and home users to use a single IP address to represent a group of computers on a public domain. The translation part of NAT between private and public addresses, allows a node or a group of nodes already setup with internal addresses to be stamped with an outside address, therefore permitting them to communicate over the Internet. Moreover, NAT helps in managing the private and public portion of the network because it can isolate the internal and exterior address spaces. This address isolation makes devices in a private network independent of the IP address hosts in the public network. There should be a distinction between NAT solution and firewall solution. The confusion comes from the fact that a large number of software packages do both function within the same device which is labelled a NAT box (Balchunas, 2013). NAT is a solution that allows the connection several nodes by using a single public IP address that is often confused with a firewall solution, which is intended to implement the security procedures of the organization.
The scheme of NAT is centred on the point that only a few dedicated nods in the interior network are interacting outside the network. In a private network, the only available choice is to establish IP level connectivity when using higher layer protocol for which there is no designated gateway. The range of IP addresses available in a private network that can’t be routed in the public network are as follow (Antoniou, 2007): * 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255/8