Windows Vista networking technologies

In computing, Microsoft's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 introduced in 2007/2008 a new networking stack named Next Generation TCP/IP stack, to improve on the previous stack in several ways. The stack includes native implementation of IPv6, as well as a complete overhaul of IPv4. The new TCP/IP stack uses a new method to store configuration settings that enables more dynamic control and does not require a computer restart after a change in settings. The new stack, implemented as a dual-stack model, depends on a strong host-model and features an infrastructure to enable more modular components that one can dynamically insert and remove.

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 , and unformatted RAW . 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, , Loopback and . 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:

...
Wikipedia