An enterprise may wish to acquire its Internet connectivity from more than one Internet Service Provider (ISP) for several reasons. Maintaining connectivity via more than one ISP can be viewed as a way to increase the reliability of Internet connectivity. Such multiply connected enterprises are referred to as being "multi-homed." When connectivity through one of the ISPs fails, connectivity via the other ISP(s) enables the enterprise to preserve its connectivity to the Internet. In addition to providing more reliable connectivity, maintaining connectivity via more than one ISP also enables the enterprise to distribute load among multiple connections. For enterprises that span wide geographical areas, this could also enable better (more optimal) routing. In this paper we describe how Network Address Translators (NATs) can be used to address the deficiencies previously discussed, while at the same time facilitate scalable routing for multi-homed multi-provider connectivity. The scheme described in this paper (a) does not require enterprise host renumbering when changing ISPs, and (b) allows load distribution that does not depend on the address assignment scheme inside an enterprise. To provide connectivity fail over, the scheme described in this paper uses the mechanisms similar to the ones described in [RFC2260]. The scheme described in this paper is equally applicable to both IPv4 and IPv6.
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