NAT stands for Network Address Translation / Network Address Translator.

It was proposed and described in RFC-1631 as a way of solving IP address depletion problems. Each NAT has a 'table' of local IP addresses and globally unique addresses by which the NAT box can translate the local IP addresses to global address and vice versa.

Basically it is a method used by routers and some proxy server software of connecting multiple 'local' computers to the Internet using one IP address - i.e. connecting multiple computers through a single Internet connection.

For more details see RFC-1631 (in Adobe Acrobat .pdf format).

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