NAT Traversal Operation
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8/28/2008
NAT Traversal relies on discovery and control protocols that are part of the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Forum defined specifications. The UPnP Forum has a working committee focused on defining the control protocol for Internet gateway devices and defining the services for these devices.
Internet gateway devices that support the required elements of the Internet Gateway Device control protocol advertise their presence and publish XML description documents to control points on their local network. From these documents, you can determine what UPnP actions control points should call to determine if an Internet Gateway has a NAT enabled, get the external IP address of the NAT, and create port mappings.
The NAT Traversal API in Windows abstracts the need to use UPnP directly, providing interfaces to detect, manage and configure the NAT device.
See Also
Concepts
Network Address Translation
NAT Traversal
NAT Traversal in Internet Gateways