When a NAT device performs network address translation on a flow of packets, the NAT device determines how long the new address will remain valid if the flow of traffic stops (for example, the connected VPN peer may be idle). The device may reclaim and reuse a NAT address when a connection remains idle for too long.

To work around this, when you enable NAT traversal specify how often the FortiGate unit sends periodic keepalive packets through the NAT device in order to ensure that the NAT address mapping does not change during the lifetime of a session. To be effective, the keepalive interval must be smaller than the session lifetime value used by the NAT device.

The keepalive packet is a 138-byte ISAKMP exchange.