What is Port Forwarding? With example
In this tutorial, we are going to see What is Port Forwarding? With example.
First of all, we recommend you to see What is NAT (Network Address Translation)?.
What is Port Forwarding?
Address translation only allows requests from the internal network to be relayed to the external network, which means that it is impossible for an external machine to send a packet to a machine on the internal network. This means that machines on the internal network cannot function as a server to the outside world.
For this reason, there is an extension of NAT called Port Forwarding or Port mapping, which consists of configuring the gateway to forward all packets received on a particular port to a specific machine on the internal network. Thus, if you want to be able to access a web server (port 80) running on the 192.168.1.151 machine from outside, you will need to define a port forwarding rule on the gateway, redirecting all TCP packets received on its port 80 to the 192.168.1.151 machine.