Bridging network traffic between wireless and wired lans in Windows NT

This paper presents two different alternatives for interconnecting Local Area Networks (LANs) in the data link layer. The solutions use a Windows NT workstation as a bridge between separate networks. Interconnection is provided by either implementing an intermediate driver or a protocol driver into the Windows NT networking stack. Both alternatives screen traffic according to the address fields of network frames and therefore unnecessary traffic can be avoided. Bridge will be used for interconnections between an Ethernet wired LAN, a standard IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN, and TUTWLAN that is a wireless LAN designed at Tampere University of Technology. The protocol driver is concluded to be a more practical alternative for implementing the bridging functionality in TUTWLAN because of its simpler structure and estimated higher performance.