NetBEUI Frame Protocol

NetBEUI Frame Protocol (NBF), part of the NetBIOS/NetBEUI suit of protocols for Windows, is a protocol used to provide the following simple services:

• Connectionless unreliable data sending of a computer network or medium (datagram), or
• A more reliable connection-oriented communication method. (virtual circuit)

Since NBF uses actual user-readable identifiers and these names do not cross routers, if a person were to assign a device a very common network name, there would be a high probability of another device having the same name. For this reason, the protocol was not designed to be used on larger networks and is constrained to small home networks; a user is notified immediately if another device on the network has the same name.