Introduction

NetBIOS is often described as a "Session Layer" protocol and a variety of transport systems have been used in different implementations. Particularly because NetBIOS is a non-routable protocol, it has often been implemented using other routable protocols to provide the transport.

It has traditionally been the NetBIOS API that has been the "standard". In most implementations (certainly NetBIOS over TCP/IP and NetBIOS over IPX), encapsulation has been implemented to ensure that higher level protocols (such as SMB) can run over the encapsulated protocol in the same way as they would run over NetBIOS Frames Protocol, NBF (otherwise known as NetBEUI or NetBIOS). Thus it is important to understand the NetBIOS Frames Protocol, NBF in order to understand the various encapsulation implementations.