Windows Networking Reworked

Windows Vista and Windows Server “Longhorn” include substantial changes to their networking components, including complete redesigns of the TCP/IP and Server Message Block (SMB) protocol stacks, which should improve the performance, security, and management of Windows networking. Although most of the networking changes occur deep within the OS, Vista includes significant changes to the user interface in an attempt to make it easier for users to find and manage networked resources. Microsoft has also made a small subset of the changes, such as hardware offload and acceleration, available for Windows Server 2003, but these features may require new high-end networking hardware.

Performance

Changes intended to improve network performance include improving how the TCP/IP protocol stack sends and receives network packets and adding support for offloading some network processing to specialized hardware.

Compound TCP. The new TCP protocol stack uses a new approach developed by Microsoft Research called compound TCP (CTCP) to monitor bandwidth delay, delay variations, and packet loss, in order to increase the amount of data it sends at one time.