Native 802.11 Send Operations

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Important  The Native 802.11 Wireless LAN interface is deprecated in Windows 10 and later. Please use the WLAN Device Driver Interface (WDI) instead. For more information about WDI, see WLAN Universal Windows driver model.

 

When the miniport driver's MiniportSendNetBufferLists function is called, the network data referenced through the NetBufferLists parameter are one of the following 802.11 packet types:

  • Media access control (MAC) service data unit (MSDU) packets.

  • MAC management protocol data unit (MMPDU) packets.

For more information about the frame format for these 802.11 packets, refer to Clause 8.2 of the IEEE 802.11-2012 standard.

Each transmitted 802.11 packet contains:

  • An 802.11 media access control (MAC) header. The operating system sets some of the fields within the MAC header while the 802.11 station sets other fields. For more information about the 802.11 MAC header, see 802.11 MAC Header Management.

  • An 802.11 Frame Body field. For MSDU data packets, the Frame Body field contains the unencrypted protocol data unit (PDU) payload data. If necessary, the operating system encapsulates the PDU payload using the procedure described in 802.11 Payload Encapsulation.

    If the miniport driver needs to extend and add fields to either the 802.11 MAC header or packet payload, the miniport driver must follow the guidelines described in Extending Packet Data During Send Operations.

  • Media-specific out-of-band (OOB) data referenced through the NetBufferListInfo member of the NET_BUFFER_LIST structure. The OOB data specifies transmit parameters used by the 802.11 station when sending the MSDU packet. For more information about the OOB data, see Media-Specific OOB Data for Native 802.11 Send Operations.

For more information about the methods used by the 802.11 station when performing a send operation, see Guidelines for Native 802.11 Send Operations.

For more information about the methods used by the miniport driver to send packets, see Miniport Driver Send and Receive Operations.

Note  If the miniport driver is operating in Network Monitor (NetMon) mode, it must not transmit any packets. This includes packets originated by the driver or 802.11 station, or resulting from a call to the driver's MiniportSendNetBufferLists function.