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

• NAT traversal
• Network address translation
• NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT PMP)
• STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs)
• Universal Plug and Play

[edit] External links

• UPnP Forum Internet Gateway Device protocol
• UPnP Forum Internet Gateway Device presentation
• Universal Plug and Play NAT Traversal FAQ by Microsoft. Archived copy
• Free, BSD-licenced ANSI C library to control a Universal Plug and Play Internet Gateway Device or NAT-PMP
• Linux implementation of a Internet Gateway Device server