Architecture
The Next Generation TCP/IP stack connects to NICs via a Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) driver. The network stack, implemented in tcpip.sys implements the Transport, Network and Data link layers of the TCP/IP model. The Transport layer includes implementations for TCP, UDP and unformatted RAW protocols. At the Network layer, IPv4 and IPv6 protocols are implemented in a dual-stack architecture. And the Data link layer (also called Framing layer) implements 802.3, 802.1, PPP, Loopback and tunnelling protocols. Each layer can accommodate Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) shims, which allows packets at that layer to be introspected and also host the WFP Callout API. The networking API is exposed via three components:
- Winsock
- A user mode API for abstracting network communication using sockets and ports. Datagram sockets are used for UDP, whereas Stream sockets are for TCP. While Winsock is a user mode library, it uses a kernel mode driver, called Ancillary Function Driver (AFD) to implement certain functionality.
- Winsock Kernel (WSK)
- A kernel-mode API providing the same socket-and-port abstraction as Winsock, while exposing other features such as Asynchronous I/O using I/O request packets.
- Transport Driver Interface (TDI)
- A kernel-mode API which can be used for legacy protocols like NetBIOS. It includes a component, known as TDX to map the TDI functionality to the network stack.
Read more about this topic: Windows Vista Networking Technologies
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