Patent ID: 8005098

Claim:
An appliance, comprising: one or more network interfaces, within the appliance, configured for receiving and sending packets; n network address translation (NAT) processors, within the appliance, configured to perform network address translations independently of each other; with each of said n NAT processors being assigned a predetermined, non-overlapping space of translated source addresses used by said n NAT processors; with each of said n NAT processors 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 one or more distributors, within the appliance, configured for distributing packets of streams of received non-NAT-translated packets and received NAT-translated packets to each of said n NAT processors for performing said network address translation, wherein all packets of each particular stream of said received non-translated packets are distributed to the same NAT processor of said n NAT processors according to a predetermined mapping, within the apparatus, of each source of said received non-translated packets uniquely to one of said n NAT processors; and wherein received NAT-translated packets are distributed to a NAT processor of said n NAT processors 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 NAT processor of said n NAT processors.