NAT-network address translation

The rapid growth of the Internet resulted in a shortage of IPv4 addresses. In response, the powers that be designated a specific subset of the IPv4 address space to be private, to temporarily alleviate this problem. NAT was invented in May 1994 by Paul Francies and Kjeld Borch Egevang. It became a quite popular technique to save official network address and to hide the individual network topology from the internet. In this paper we discuss the idea of Network Address Translation and special issues associated to it. We used the packet tracer in demonstration of NAT configuration. Cisco IOS syntax is used for configuration examples.