Abstract
Broadband Internet customers who want to make the Internet
available to more than one workstation on their home/office network typically
must pay extra in order to rent multiple IP addresses from their service
provider. With as few as 8 computers sharing the connection, the
price of the connection can double. For this reason, many of these
users have turned to a technique called IP masquerading, which allows the
seamless sharing of the Internet connection while looking to the outside
world like a single workstation. This usually requires a dedicated
computer with 2 Ethernet cards, typically running the Linux operating system.
This is not always easy to setup. The NetPlexor will be an easy to
use IP masquerading solution for these users. The prototype as developed
in this course will have certain limitations in order to fit within the
space constraints of the Altera FLEX10K20 FPGA device as well as to meet
our team’s time constraints. Curently, a maximum of fifteen
computers can be connected to the NetPlexor, and a maximum of 256 different
connections (IP’s) can be stored in the IP LUT. These limitations
should be acceptable in the home or small office environment to which this
product is targetted.
The NetPlexor final report can be found here in pdf format (some parts missing)
The NetPlexor project code can be downloaded here
in .tar.gz format