Transport Driver Interface TDI

Microsoft developed the Transport Driver Interface (TDI) to provide greater flexibility and functionality than is provided by existing interfaces, such as NetBIOS and Windows Sockets. All Windows transport providers expose TDI. The TDI specification describes the set of primitive functions by which transport drivers and TDI clients communicate and the call mechanisms used for accessing them. Currently, TDI is kernel-mode only. The Windows 2000 redirector and server both use TDI directly, rather than going through the NetBIOS mapping layer. By doing so, they are not subject to many of the restrictions imposed by NetBIOS, such as the legacy 254-session limit.