The Quality of Service Provided by the Integrated Services Architecture - Assignment Example

Windows Server 2003 provides network address translation (NAT) functionality as a part of the Routing and Remote Access service. The following illustration shows the routing and remote access procedure of the Network Address Translation (NAT) service.  You can see that the NAT router sits in the middle of a conversation between the public and the private machine. The packets are translated and then sent to the destination computer at the public end of the equation.  The response of the turns and the route also translates from the public network and returns the response back to the requesting client at the local end.

The workstations obtain their IP addresses in the range allowed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). IANA is responsible for allocating public addresses that are guaranteed to be globally unique on the Internet. However, there is an ever decreasing availability of Ipv4 addresses available as thousands and thousands of additional IP addresses are required daily. In the longer term, the development of IPv6 16 byte addresses should resolve this problem. Another factor about IPv6 addresses is that they are expressed in hexadecimal notation with ‘:’ as separators, rather than the current ‘.

’ notation of the IPv4 addressing system. The workaround available at the moment on small networks is to reuse IPv4 addresses. Workstations obtain their reusable (i.e. dynamic) IP addresses using a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server (DHCP). The DHCP automatically configures the IP address for every host on the network, thus ensuring that each host has a valid, unique IP address. The DHCP automatically reconfigures IP addresses on the fly, i.e. as and when hosts may or may not be present.

  One of the major advantages of DHCP is that it can save a network administrator many hours of tedious configuration work.