This read-only Counter counts frames received on this port that had to be forwarded elsewhere, to another port or up to the system module for further processing, as opposed to staying local to this port. This is the core measure of how much this port actually contributes to inter-port and inter-segment traffic on the switch, useful when identifying which ports are driving switch fabric or CPU load. A port that primarily uplinks to a busy server segment would show a high ratio of forwarded to local frames.