Port forwarding is not just for router

When you use keyword "port forwarding" to search on goole, you will find a lot of info and articles about it. Based on those info, you will know port forwarding is a very important technology. Normally, our computer behind a router and we will use our router to surf internet. The way to surf internet will make our router gain a public ip address and our computer just have a private ip address. So router is located between our computer and internet. This will cause user or service from internet can not directly access our computer. Port forwaridng is the way to resolve the problem for this scenario. What you need to do is just add a port forwarding entry into router. Router is an ip device and it will play a role of port forwarding here. It will communicate between your computer and internet. For example, you have a computer and the ip address is 192.168.20.10. If you want to open a ftp service to let users from internet can access your ftp service. What you need to do is just add a port forwarding entry into your router here. The entry will like this, listen port should be 21, then destination ip should be 192.168.20.10 and destination port is 21. Then you public a ftp service to internet now. At the same time, port forwarding is the way to speed your game and download.

But what i want to say here is, port forwarding is not just for router. A lot of people don't notice this. The info and articles from internet will mislead us that port forwarding is just a function of router. Essentially, port forwarding is a function of forwarding data between two sides. So if a software or hardware is doing this, we can just call it - port forwarding. For example, we have a computer A with ftp service and we want to access the ftp service from computer B. But computer B can not directly access computer A. We have to use computer C to access computer B. We need to deploy a port forwarding software on computer C to bridge the communication between computer A and B. So computer C and the port forwarding software on it are playing a role of forwarding data here. We can call port forwarding as port tunnel, tcp port forwarding or ip port forwarding for this scenario. The port forwarding software just simply port forward data from computer A to B here. Sometimes, port forwarding software could be more complex. For example, port forwarding to destination based on source ip address or use round robin mechanism to achieve dynamic port forwarding.

So port forwarding is not just for router. If a software or hardware is forwarding data between two or more sides, we can just call it - port forwarding.

[About author]iForwarder - We provide the best port forwarding software. You can visit us to learn more about port forwarding.