Windows Core Networking

In his introductory post about the legacy Traffic Control (TC) API , Gabe discussed the host-based model that TC provides. In this post, we will see how Traffic Control APIs can be used to achieve the following for TCP/IPv4 and UDP/IPv4 traffic sent from...

Hello all. My name is Charley. I’m the new QoS program manager for Windows Core Networking. It has been a while since we posted our last article about QoS. We want to assure you that we’re still committed to improving this technology and building new...

Consider a case where a network application calls Windows QoS APIs to add a layer-2 IEEE 802.1Q UserPriority tag (almost always referred to as 802.1p ) to outgoing traffic. Ascertaining whether the tag actually got added to an outgoing packet is not as...

Over the past few years, we've seen consumer networking products get really cheap. While cheap in a currency sense is great, we're unfortunately left experiencing the same of product quality (usually while grimacing at the "getting started" manual). Consumer...

In a previous post, I discussed traffic coloring. Modifications to a data packet such that the packet itself informs your network equipment that it requires handling different from normal packets such as best effort traffic. In other words, if you looked...

In my first post of this series, I talked about Windows Connect Now (WCN) and how easy it is in Windows Vista to discover, configure, and securely connect devices to a wireless network. In this post, I’ll talk about how to discover PCs, devices, and services...

As Gabe mentioned in his blog post titled “ Xbox 360 Fall Update Includes LLTD ,” the Xbox 360 now includes the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) protocol. At a basic function level, LLTD gives users a graphical representation of their home network...

After XP, when we reviewed the scenarios for QoS in Windows, we considered the following 4 big categories: I'm a network administrator who wants to control how the traffic from the computers on my domain will be marked with priority (DSCP). I...

Some weeks ago I described 802.1p . It's a way to color traffic on your local network segment. If you have network equipment aware of this tag, you can get strict prioritization at these hops. Still, the tag is at layer-2 and not layer-3; your average...

Parts 1-3 of this series on WMM provided a bunch of details about how the Windows Vista network stack enables prioritization on WiFi networks, and how to figure out if the access point actually supports this capability. This post describes what behavior...

In addition to a completely re-written core networking stack, Windows Vista makes networking a significantly easier proposition for home, small business, and enterprise users. In this multi-part series, I’ll describe some new features which greatly simplify...

Congratulations to D-Link (powered by Ubicom ) for being the first ever to acheive a Windows Vista logo for the DIR-655 wireless router. While Buffalo acheived the premium "Certified for Windows Vista" logo , D-Link was first to meet the baseline "Works...

Recently, I read a great article on ZDNet that discusses the challenges IEEE 802.11n faces with 2.4GHz operation. The article is appropriately titled The Consequences of Abandoning the 5GHz Frontier , and discusses some history, backward compatibility...

Update: This tool is no longer available on Microsoft Connect and there is no replacement download site. In my last post , I announced the availability of QoS Traffic Generator on Microsoft Connect. In order to help you understand the usage of this...

Parts 1 and 2 of this series discussed how to determine whether an 802.1p tag was added to traffic, and how to modify the NDIS light-weight-filter (LWF) sample driver source code to accomplish this task. We do know that you're all very busy and not everyone...

In Windows Vista, a great deal of effort has gone into making it simple for network applications to take advantage of QoS capable networks. This post focuses on QoS for WiFi networks (both consumer and enterprise) and how the Vista network stack enables...

Hopefully you've read the previous entry with the QOS2 sample. Here are the answers to questions you might have. What header file do I need to include? qos2.h Is this only for user-mode applications? yes it is. However, leave us a comment if...

Over the past few months we've been receiving feedback from partners on the new QOS2 API I just wrote about . The first question is often: how do I use this new API in my application? So I thought we should introduce some of the API calls by modifying...

Having spent numerous hours working with analysts reviewing Media Center Extender products to help correct WiFi installation problems, I would like to spare other folks the pain of going through this process uninformed, and share the many ways to successfully...

There has been a lot of buzz about the recent fall update for the Xbox 360; however, an important new feature which has not been mentioned is support for the Link Layer Topology Discovery ( LLTD ) protocol. In its basic form, LLTD allows a Windows Vista...

The “Certified for Windows Vista” logo is comprised of requirements for myriad networking features and scenarios, one of which being network Quality of Service (QoS). What is QoS and why is it important you ask? QoS is an overloaded term, but in short...

Update: This tool is no longer available on Microsoft Connect and there is no replacement download site. I’m posting on behalf of Jim Liu who is a SDET in Windows Core Networking. -- Ari The QoS team is pleased to announce the availability...

In his previous posts, Gabe introduced networking's QoS team and touched upon some of the areas we're focused on. Over the next few months, we'll present some of the technologies we've been building. Before we look at these, I'd like to cover some of...

Last week I added QOS2 calls to a sample Winsock application to obtain DSCP marking. The second request we get from developers is to shape their outgoing traffic, i.e. limit the rate at which their traffic is sent. With Vista you configure this on your...

My previous post on WiFi QoS (WMM) discussed the four access classes (BG, BE, VI, and VO) available for traffic differentiation. I also highlighted that packets containing either a layer-2 802.1p tag or layer-3 DSCP mark (i.e. packets associated with...