IEEE 802.11 Technology

The Microsoft® Windows® XP and Windows .NET server operating systems include support for secure access to the network via IEEE 802.1X, providing support for wireless LANs and Ethernet. This support includes automatic network detection and configuration, and network identification and mode selection (Infrastructure/ad hoc) for IEEE 802.11 LANs.

Windows Quality of Service (QoS) components provide link layer priority information to NDIS 5.0 miniport drivers in each transmitted packet's NDIS_PER_PACKET_INFO structure. Priority values are derived by mapping Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Integrated Services (intserv) service types to IEEE 802.1p priority values (referred to as the "user priority" object. The intserv service type used for the mapping is determined by QoS-aware applications or on behalf of the application, by QoS-aware operating system components.

IEEE 802.1p/q-capable Ethernet drivers are expected to use the priority level indicated in the NDIS_PER_PACKET_INFO structure to generate the corresponding field in the IEEE 802.1p/q MAC headers of transmitted packets. Similarly, these drivers are expected to extract the appropriate information from the MAC headers of received packets and to copy the priority to the NDIS_PER_PACKET_INFO structure before indicating the packet to higher protocol layers.

Note that any link layer driver may interpret the priority information in the NDIS_PER_PACKET_INFO structure and use it as appropriate for the particular media.

News source: Microsoft Windows Platform Development - IEEE 802.11 Technology