Importance

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Abstract

Methods and systems for an intelligent network protection gateway (NPG) are provided. According to one embodiment, a firewall prevents unauthorized network-lawyer access to internal hosts by hosts of an external network by performing network address translation (NAT) processing of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The firewall changes data in headers of VoIP packets and corresponding data contents of the VoIP packets, to enable bi-directional VoIP communications. An external VoIP interface of the firewall facilitates concurrent management of multiple incoming VoIP calls by providing multiple VoIP ports and advertising multiple IP address/VoIP port pairs corresponding to internal hosts. When incoming VoIP packets are received, the packets are directed to an appropriate internal host by the firewall performing port forwarding based on a port indication contained within the packets to a server or gatekeeper within the internal network that maintains a mapping of user aliases to private addresses of the internal hosts.

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First Claim