Address plus Port
Encyclopedia
The Address plus Port (A+P) Approach to the IPv4 Address Shortage is a technique for sharing single IPv4 addresses among several users without using stateful NAT
. The technique is described in experimental RFC 6346.
Normal routing only uses IPv4 address to identifying which host traffic is destined for, A+P also uses destination TCP
or UDP
port. Each host is assigned a range of ports for which they receive traffic for, this also means they can only use these ports as source port when sending traffic.
A+P is similar but not identical to stateful NAT, as the A+P gateway does not need to keep track of every TCP or UDP flow.
Network address translation
In computer networking, network address translation is the process of modifying IP address information in IP packet headers while in transit across a traffic routing device....
. The technique is described in experimental RFC 6346.
Normal routing only uses IPv4 address to identifying which host traffic is destined for, A+P also uses destination TCP
Transmission Control Protocol
The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol , and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP...
or UDP
User Datagram Protocol
The User Datagram Protocol is one of the core members of the Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network protocols used for the Internet. With UDP, computer applications can send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol network without requiring...
port. Each host is assigned a range of ports for which they receive traffic for, this also means they can only use these ports as source port when sending traffic.
A+P is similar but not identical to stateful NAT, as the A+P gateway does not need to keep track of every TCP or UDP flow.