What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of NAT (Network Address Translation)

Network Address Translation (NAT) technology has many advantages and disadvantages. Main advantages and disadvantages of NAT (Network Address Translation) are listed below.

Advantages of NAT

• The main advantage of NAT (Network Address Translation) is that it can prevent the depletion of IPv4 addresses.

• NAT (Network Address Translation) can provide an additional layer of security by making the oringinal source and destination addresses hidden.

• NAT (Network Address Translation) provides increased flexibility when connecting to the public Internet.

• NAT (Network Address Translation) allows to use your own private IPv4 addressing system and prevent the internal address changes if you change the service provider.

Disadvantages of NAT

• NAT (Network Address Translation) is a processor and memory resource consuming technology, since NAT (Network Address Translation) need to translate IPv4 addresses for all incoming and outgoing IPv4 datagrams and to keep the translation details in memory.

• NAT (Network Address Translation) may cause delay in IPv4 communication.

• NAT (Network Address Translation) cause loss of end-device to end-device IP traceability

• Some technologies and network applications will not function as expected in a NAT (Network Address Translation) configured network.