20120113966 | METHOD TO MAINTAIN NETWORK ADDRESS TRANSLATION (NAT) BINDING - A method to maintain Network Address Translation (NAT) binding is provided in the present invention, comprising a mobile terminal proactively initiating a connection request for establishing a link to a computing device via a wireless network, an edge NAT router connected to the wireless network, and other routers; the edge NAT router mapping a source address of a data packet from the mobile terminal to the source address of the edge NAT router, and mapping a destination address of the data packet from the computing device to the destination address of the mobile terminal, and maintaining the two address mapping relationships for a first time interval; the computing device sending a heartbeat packet to the mobile terminal according to a second time interval smaller than the first time interval, so a Time To Live (TTL) set value progressively decreases to 0 as the heartbeat packet reaches the edge NAT router, wherein the heartbeat packet sent by the computing device is used to maintain the mapping relationships of the addresses for the edge NAT router, thereby maintaining the link from the mobile terminal to the computing device, such that the heartbeat packet will not be sent down to the handheld device, thereby reducing as much consumption of the battery life and wireless air-interface resources as possible. | 05-10-2012 |