Enhancing the Windows Network Device Interface Specification for Wireless Networking

Radical differences in channel characteristics coupled with endnode mobility make wireless networking sufficiently different from wired networking. Unfortunately, under current implementations of most operating systems a local area wireless network is treated as "just-another-wired-network" and is exposed to the higher layer networking protocols, operating system, and applications as an Ethernet technology. This then limits the system and applications ability to adapt to the changing channel conditions and prevents software vendors from developing adaptive and novel applications. In this paper we describe how the network architecture of a popular operating system, Windows, can be enhanced to support wireless-aware and mobility-aware networking and applications. We describe a couple of wireless systems that we have built and deployed, which would not have been possible without these extensions.