Virtualizing Customer-Premises Equipment via Network Address Translation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional customer-premises equipment for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is often expensive, complex, and user-unfriendly, requiring frequent software and hardware upgrades, which burdens both ISPs and customers with high costs and technical challenges.
Innovation Solution
The system and method for virtualizing customer-premises equipment involve receiving network traffic, identifying non-unique private addresses, determining unique routable addresses, and translating these addresses to facilitate efficient routing, thereby reducing equipment and upgrade expenses by maintaining unique network interfaces for each private network.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If conventional customer-premises equipment is used, then routing functionality is provided, but equipment cost and complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the routing functionality from the customer-premises equipment and relocates it to the service provider's network. The CPE is replaced with a simple bridge device that forwards traffic to the service provider's gateway, which performs all routing operations. This extraction eliminates the need for expensive, complex routing hardware at the customer site.
Solution Approach 2:
The service provider's gateway acts as an intermediary between the customer's private network and the public network. Instead of requiring the customer's equipment to perform routing functions directly, the gateway mediates all routing operations, simplifying the customer's equipment while maintaining full routing capability through the intermediary.
2Adaptability or versatility
If software and hardware upgrades are implemented periodically, then new virtual services are supported, but coordination complexity and customer impact increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the service support functionality from the customer's CPE and concentrates it in the service provider's gateway. This allows the service provider to implement software updates and new service capabilities centrally in their network infrastructure without requiring any changes or coordination at customer sites, eliminating the complexity of distributed upgrades.
3Speed
If address translation is performed at the service provider's network, then routing efficiency improves, but network processing load increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs address translation in advance as traffic enters the service provider's network. The gateway translates private addresses to public addresses before routing decisions are made, so that subsequent routing operations work with already-translated addresses. This preliminary action optimizes routing efficiency while concentrating the processing load at a single point in the network.
Data Source
AI summary
A computer-implemented method for virtualizing customer-premises equipment may include (1) receiving, at a service provider's network, at least one flow of network traffic from a remote device included in a user's private network, (2) identifying, within the flow of network traffic, at least one potentially non-unique private address that represents the remote device with respect to the user's private network, (3) determining at least one unique routable address that represents the remote device with respect to the service provider's network based at least in part on a network interface assigned to the user's private network and the potentially non-unique private address, and then (4) translating the potentially non-unique private address to the unique routable address to facilitate routing return network traffic to the remote device in connection with the flow of network traffic. Various other systems, methods, and computer-readable media are also disclosed.