What is NAT traversal?
NAT means Network Address Translation. When you connect to the Internet, information you send and receive is typically passed through a firewall, which protects your network infrastructure from hackers. Each individual network that is connected to the public Internet is identified by an IP address. Devices on the outside of your firewall see your publicly-routed IP Address; devices on the network inside of the firewall are addressed with private, non-routable IP addresses. When information passes through the firewall, it does so in the form of data “packets.” Each packet contains an IP address, telling it where it’s from and where it’s going. When a packet passes through the firewall to the public Internet, the private IP address is replaced with the publicly-routed IP address. When information passes from the public Internet through the firewall, the publicly-routed IP address is replaced with a private one and routed to the appropriate device.
