Miniports, Intermediate Drivers, and Protocol Drivers

Microsoft Windows CE supports the following three basic types of kernel-mode network drivers:

Miniport Drivers

A miniport driver directly manages a network interface card (NIC) and provides an interface to higher-level drivers.
Intermediate Drivers

An intermediate protocol driver interfaces between upper-level protocol drivers, such as a legacy transport driver, and a miniport driver. You might develop an intermediate protocol driver to perform media translation between an existing legacy transport driver and a miniport that manages a NIC for a new medium type unknown to the transport driver.
Protocol Drivers

An upper level protocol driver implements a Transport Driver Interface (TDI) or another application-specific interface at its upper-edge to provide services to users of the network. At its lower edge, this type of driver provides a protocol interface to pass packets to and receive incoming packets from the next-lower driver.

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