Performance analysis of IP masquerade on linux workstation

IP Masquerade, one solution to solve the problem of exhausted IP addresses, is a form of network address translation (NAT) that many routers already support. Though there exits a long-term solution, the patch NAT solutions, such as IP Masquerade, are very important during the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Furthermore, NAT takes not only advantage of the concept of private IP address to achieve the mechanism of Firewall, separates the inter-network from the Internet, but also provides the transparency of address translation to supply numerous hosts getting onto the Internet with private network addresses. In this paper, we implement a test-bed to study the performance of IP Masquerade. The results show that it can fix the IP insufficient problem. Furthermore, it can achieve the load balancing for the users in the private networks.