Host-initiated NAT
This document presents a new method to implement the NAT function, which requires the cooperating of the hosts and the NAT gateway. The proposed NAT mechanism is called Host-initiated NAT, or HI-NAT for short. Traditional NAT function is performed in the gateway, while the hosts are not aware of the address translation at all. One drawback of such mechanism is that all translation works need to be done in one device, the NAT gateway, which may bring performance bottleneck. The presented HI-NAT mechanism shows another possible solution to improve network performance by the cooperating of the hosts and the Gateway. In more details, the hosts will initiate the NAT procedure with its local IP address. After getting the translated IP address, the hosts will use it in every packet sending out to ease the translating workload of the NAT gateway.