Load Balancing across Multiple Network Address Translation (NAT) Instances and/or Processors

A method, comprising:

• network address translating, by an apparatus, a source address of a plurality of packets of a plurality of streams of packets by their respective assigned network address translation (NAT) instance of n NAT instances, with n being greater than one, wherein a stream corresponding to a particular packet is identified by a particular source address of the particular packet;
• and wherein the address space of said source addresses of the plurality of streams of packets is approximately evenly partitioned into n portions with each portion being assigned to a single different one of said n NAT instances;
• and wherein said network address translating includes selecting a new translated source address for each identifiable packet of the plurality of packets and forwarding a translated packet, representing said identifiable packet, including the new translated source address as the source address of the translated packet;
• wherein the space of said translated source addresses to use is partitioned approximately equally among said n NAT instances, and such that each said translated source address, when used in identifying a source of a received translated packet received by the apparatus, readily maps to a particular NAT instance of said n NAT instances that was used to said translate the corresponding said source address into said translated source address.

An apparatus comprising:

• means for sending and receiving packets;
• n means for performing network address translation (NAT) configured to perform network address translations independently of each other;
• with each of said n means for performing NAT being assigned a predetermined, non-overlapping space of translated source addresses used by said n means for performing NAT;
• with each of said n means for performing NAT being configured to:
• translate non-translated packets to use source addresses from its said assigned space of translated source addresses, and to translate received translated packets with destination addresses in its said assigned space of translated source addresses;
• and with n being an integer greater than one;
• and
• means for distributing packets of streams of received non-NAT-translated packets and received NAT-translated packets to said n means for performing NAT, wherein all packets of each particular stream of said received non-translated packets are distributed to the same means for performing NAT of said n means for performing NAT according to a predetermined mapping of each source of said received non-translated packets uniquely to one of said n means for performing NAT;
• and wherein received NAT-translated packets are distributed to a means for performing NAT of said n means for performing NAT according to said assigned spaces of translated source addresses;
• and wherein corresponding streams of said received non-NAT-translated packets and received NAT-translated packets are distributed to the same means for performing NAT of said n means for performing NAT.