Short for
Network Driver Interface Specification, a
Windows device driver interface that enables a single
network interface card (NIC) to support multiple
network protocols. For example, with NDIS a single NIC can support both
TCP/IP and
IPX connections. NDIS can also be used by some
ISDN adapters.
NDIS includes a protocol manager that accepts requests from the network driver (at the transport layer) and passes these requests to the NIC (at the data link layer). So multiple NDIS-conforming network drivers can co-exist. Also, if a computer contains multiple NICs because it is connected to more than one network, NDIS can route traffic to the correct card.
NDIS was developed by Microsoft and 3COM. Novell offers a similar device driver for NetWare called Open Data-Link Interface (ODI).
