Using the remote socket architecture as NAT replacement

Proxy architectures are used in the Internet today in order to improve performance or to introduces security mechanisms. Beside these two important issues, a further problem is the shortness of addresses of Internet Protocol version 4. Widely deployed solutions to stretch the number of available addresses are network address translation (NAT) and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP). In spite of their wide-spread use, these approaches have some drawbacks which limit their general deployment (e.g. some applications need a special treatment). We introduce a performance enhancing proxy (PEP) architecture, which solves the address shortness problem while have appealing features to improve wireless Internet access and Internet access via telephone links.