Mint: A cost-effective network-address translation architecture with Multiple Inexpensive NAT servers

In this paper, we present a novel architecture, named Mint (Multiple Inexpensive Network-address Translation), to provide cost-effective NAT (Network-address Translation) services based on multiple (inexpensive) NAT servers. The proposed system architecture utilizes MAC-rewrite techniques and integrates a set of (inexpensive) NAT servers to share the NAT operation loads for all the network packets passing between the internal/external networks separated by the NAT servers. Potential benefits of the proposed scheme are to provide a cost-effective NAT service solution to maximize utilization of aggregated external network bandwidth offered by a set of (inexpensive) NAT servers. We demonstrated that the proposed scheme can be easily deployed with commodity computing servers and off-the-shelf NAT servers. Also, we showed, in this paper, the number of sustainable concurrent (http) connections can be boosted effectively as more NAT servers are added, whenever the packet processing speed of each NAT servers are far behind the demands.