NDIS

Each letter of this networking term in pronounced separately and this term is an acronym for Network Driver Interface Specification. It is a Windows device driver, application programming interface or API for the network interface cards or NICs to support multiple network protocols, for example with a single NDIS a NIC can support, both the TCP/IP and IPX protocols at one time. This technology was developed by the joined contribution of the Microsoft and the 3Com Corporation; however, it is mostly used by the Microsoft, and along with that, this technology can also be used with some ISDN adapters.

Another feature of this technology is that it was developed with an embedded protocol manager that accepts the requests from the network driver at the transport layer of the OSI model. After receiving the requests at this layer, it also passes these requests to the NIC at the data link layer, hence as a result of this feature multiple NDIS conforming network drivers can co-exist at one time, and moreover, even if a computer contains multiple NICs in it ,as it is connected to several different networks at the same time, still the NDIS is capable of sending the data to the right card without any issue, thus making the job of the administrator of the network easier and simpler, as he won’t have to worry about the information going to a wrong card.

The underlying technology of the NIC is quite complex, however, it is covered by the NDIS functions, and many people who use this technology has no idea as to the underlying complexity of the NIC. Since NDIS was first released, many versions of this technology had been introduced in the market, so that they could be used with the different and newer version of the windows, that were introduced by the Microsoft to the world.