DS-Lite: AX Series Advanced Traffic Manager

In the past two decades, IP networks have evolved and the number of IP-enabled devices soared at a tremendous pace. Globally unique IPv4 addresses are in great demand and IPv4 address exhaustion has been observed since the mid-1990s. NAT (Network Address Translation) became a popular tool for alleviating the IPv4 address exhaustion.

However, many experts predict that the supply of available IPv4 addresses will run out sometime between 2011 and 2013, while at the same time we are starting to see much more interest in IPv6 due to strong Mobile IP support. Many people acknowledge that even if they implement IPv6, they still need to communicate with the existing IPv4 world, even if that entails more complexity and compromises. There are several new competing NAT technologies to address the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

Solution with Advanced NAT Technologies

The A10 solution is to use new and emerging technologies, which are being developed to combat the issues of traditional NAT today. Although IPv6 is an option, networks are currently IPv4 centric, with IPv6 deployment progressing slowly. Intermediate technologies to improve NAT efficiency and scale networks include:

Carrier Grade NAT (CGN or CGNAT) also known as Large Scale NAT (LSN)

• Carriers (i.e. ISPs) can allocate multiple clients to a single IPv4 address
• Standardizes behavior for IPv4 NAT devices
  • Consistent behavior and expectations for applications
• Delivers efficiency through features, and examples include:
  • Hairpinning
  • Full cone NAT
  • "Fairness" by user allocated port quotas

Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite)

• Enables incremental IPv6 deployment
• Deploy a single IPv6 network to serve
• IPv4 and IPv6 clients IPv4 (tunneled from customer's gateway) over IPv6 (carrier's network) to NAT device (carrier's device allowing connection to IPv4 Internet, which can also apply LSN/CGN)
• Simplifies carrier deployment and management

High Performance NAT Platform

A10's AX Series Advanced Traffic Managers are specifically built for processor intensive high volume networking tasks, such as NAT. The AX Series includes the Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS), which integrates modern multi-core, multi-threaded software to provide significant performance advantages. The AX Series includes:

• Custom high performance hardware and software platform
• Scalable - session establishment rates and concurrent sessions
• High volume of NAT packets per second
• Throughput of 1 Gb up to 40 Gb
• Stateful high availability for robustness

Industry leading performance is achieved via leveraging Flexible ASIC enhanced Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) technologies. The AX Series processes application traffic in parallel fashion, without the need to copy data or replicate computing instructions. As a result, these applications run faster with AX Series than competing systems on the market today.