NDIS Miniport Drivers
NDIS supports various basic types of network interface card (NIC) drivers. These are connectionless NDIS miniports, connection-oriented NDIS miniports and NDIS miniports with a WDM Lower Edge.
NDIS Protocol Drivers
Protocol drivers bind to an underlying miniport driver or intermediate driver that exports a MiniportXxx interface at its upper edge.
NDIS 6 Intermediate Drivers
NDIS intermediate drivers interface between upper-level protocol drivers and miniport drivers. Sample applications that might require an intermediate driver include load balancing fail over (LBFO) solutions. Typically NDIS 6 intermediate drivers are used in a mux or demux scenario with a 1-n or n-1 relationship between upper edge and lower edge.
NDIS 6 Filter Drivers
In NDIS 6 the following applications are typically not implemented by intermediate drivers any more:
Data filtering for security or other purposes, monitoring and collecting of network data statistics, etc. Such applications are implemented using NDIS 6 Filter drivers or using the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP).