Internet Connection Sharing

  • Article

Internet connection sharing (ICS) is a collection of technologies and services that connect networked computing and information devices to the Internet through a single Internet connection. ICS provides sharing of a single Internet connection by allowing a device that runs the Microsoft® Windows® CE .NET operating system (OS) to act as a gateway between the Internet and a local area network (LAN). The gateway device uses one network connection for the Internet connection and a second network connection for the connection to the local network.

The following illustration shows the relationship between the local area network (in this case, a home network), the gateway device, and the Internet.

ICS provides the following capabilities:

  • Automatic configuration of local-area addressing information through a subset of services provided by a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server

  • Automatic support for name resolution without reconfiguration through a Domain Name System (DNS) proxy

  • Support for Internet address sharing through network address translation (NAT)

  • Demand-dial routing of packets to and from the Internet through the use of auto dial

    Note   In topics related to ICS, outbound describes Internet Protocol (IP) traffic from the LAN or the ICS gateway to the Internet. Inbound refers to IP packets arriving from the Internet.

See Also

DHCP Allocator | DNS Proxy | Network Address Translation | Auto Dial for ICS | ICS Web-based Configuration Utility | Internet Connection Sharing Registry Settings

 Last updated on Thursday, April 08, 2004

© 1992-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.