Economically managing multiple private data networks

In many cases, there is a need to manage a local addressing realm from a manager site located outside the realm. A particular important example is the case of NM service providers who provide network management services from a remote site. Such providers may have many customers, each using the same private address space. When all these networks are to be managed from a single management station, address collision may occur. One way to overcome address collision is to use network address translation (NAT). The problem is that many network management applications use IP address information at the application level. Therefore, in order to work correctly, these NM applications should be aware of NAT. However, most commonly used NM applications are unaware of NAT and are most likely to remain so in the near future (due to the large investment involved). This paper describes a design and implementation of a solution that is transparent to the network management application (but not to the user), and does not require a general reconfiguration of a large portion of the network. It converts conflicting addresses into non-conflicting addresses by combining NAT and SNMP payload translation, and allows multiple private networks to be managed on a single management platform.