Which device is commonly used at the network edge to perform NAT and firewall duties for a home network?

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At the boundary between your home network and the Internet, the device that handles both address translation and traffic filtering is a router. It sits at the edge, routing traffic between your local network and the wider world, and it usually performs NAT to let many private IPs share a single public IP. It also provides basic firewall capabilities to block unwanted inbound connections and control outbound traffic, helping protect devices inside the network.

A switch stays inside the LAN and operates at a lower level, forwarding frames based on MAC addresses and not translating IP addresses or enforcing cross-network security. A hub just repeats signals with no intelligence. A bridge connects network segments but doesn’t typically perform NAT or firewall functions. Since NAT and firewall duties are exactly the kinds of tasks a router is designed to handle at the network edge, the router is the usual choice for a home setup.