June 2013
Beginner
950 pages
30h 26m
English
This last of the chapters about IPv4 topics looks at a very popular and very important part of both enterprise and small office/home office (SOHO) networks: Network Address Translation, or NAT. NAT helped solve a big problem with IPv4: The IPv4 address space would have been completely consumed by the mid-1990s. After it was consumed, the Internet could not continue to grow, which would have significantly slowed the development of the Internet.
This chapter actually discusses two short-term solutions to the IPv4 address exhaustion issue, which also serves as a good lead-in to IP version 6 (IPv6). NAT, along with classless interdomain routing (CIDR), helped extend the life of IPv4 as the network layer protocol ...