Week 5 Posting - BSIT220 - Network Address Translation (Review)

This week I wanted to take some time and use this week's blog post both as a personal review and extra reading. When going through the routing chapter the topic of Network Address Translation came up and I felt like I'm still confused about it. 

NAT is a way to map multiple local private addresses to a public one before transferring the information. It helps when organizations and companies want multiple devices to use a single IP address. Home routers will also do the same thing with devices on the network. NAT was originally introduced to help ease the shift from IPv4 to IPv6 since the world was exhausting its supply of IPv4 addresses. It's great for security and keeping
private IP addresses from being used for interactions on the global network. There are three different types of NAT: 

Static NAT - When the local address is converted to a public one, the NAT chooses the same one, meaning that it will have a consistent public IP address. 

Dynamic NAT - The NAT chooses to go through a list of public IP addresses instead of having a static one. The router will get a different address each time it needs to translate the local address to a public address.

Port Address Translation PAT - Which is a type of Dynamic NAT that bands several local IP addresses into a singular public one. This is the one that companies use to keep all of their devices on a single public IP address.