What does port forwarding do?

[saba17]

Hello,so what does port forwarding do?and is it better for gaming when i do port forwarding?I know that it needs to have static IP so is it worth to change my IP to static?

[Sir Asvald]

Port Forwarding sets up public services on your network such as web servers, FTP servers, e-mail servers, or other specialized Internet applications. When users send this type of request to your network via the Internet, the router will forward these requests to the appropriate computer.  For example, if you're hosting a website you'd open ports 80 an 443. 

 

As for gaming, 

 

Port forwarding – or creating a port forward – is a common process in gaming that makes your gaming console or PC more accessible to other gaming consoles or PCs on the Internet. Port forwarding can improve connection speed, lobby wait times, and overall gameplay, particularly for a host

[Jarsky]

Its worth noting that in most cases this is done automatically via a feature called uPnP (Universal Plug'n'Play). 

Devices/applications that support uPnP will negotiate with uPnP compatible routers (pretty much all consumer routers) to automatically setup the port forwarding. 

 

So 90% of the time you don't need to do anything. If youre talking about the likes of an Xbox or PS you can run a connectivity test which will test if active connections can be made which indicates port forwarding is already configured. 

[Windows7ge]

Already thoroughly covered above port forwarding is basically just a firewall exception in your router allowing external connections to talk to internal clients based on port number.

 

As for needing a Static IP this depends on weather you're talking about the end devices IP or your routers public IP address. In the case of your end device you would indeed want a static IP but you also don't want your router trying to hand out that IP to a different client so it's recommended to either shrink the DHCP pool in your router or use your router to reserve that IP for the end device.

 

As for your Public IP. Ideally you don't want this to change either but requesting a Static IP from your ISP can be either an additional fee or not supported by your ISP when on a residential connection. In either case look into services like No-IP. This is a Dynamic DNS service that let's you use a domain name and automatically tracks your ever changing public IP.

 

There's other issues you can run into with port forwarding such as being trapped behind NAT or NAT64-CGNAT where you either have to change your router setup or change ISPs respectively (Or explore VPN/VPS services) but that's not immediately relevant.