Internet Gateway Device Protocol
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (March 2008) |
Internet Gateway Device (IGD) Standardized Device Control Protocol is supported by some NAT routers. It is a common method of automatically configuring port forwarding, but is not an Internet Engineering Task Force document.
Applications using peer-to-peer networks, multi-player gaming, and remote assistance programs need a way to communicate through home and business gateways. Without IGD one has to manually configure the gateway to allow traffic through, a process which is time consuming and can be difficult. Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) comes with a solution for network address translation traversal.
IGD makes it easy to do the following:
- Learn the public (external) IP address
- Enumerate existing port mappings
- Add and remove port mappings
- Assign lease times to mappings
[edit] See also
- Network address translation
- NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT PMP)
- STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs)
- Universal Plug and Play
