
224 Part Two • IPv6 Protocols
13.1 The Neighbor Discovery Protocol
As noted in the abstract of RFC 2461, “IPv6 nodes on the same link
use Neighbor Discovery to discover each other’s presence, to determine
each other’s link layer addresses, to find routers and to maintain reach-
ability information about the paths to active neighbors.” Five types of
ICMPv6 messages to be used in neighbor discovery are defined in RFC
2461, including a pair of messages for router solicitation and router adver-
tisement, a pair for neighbor solicitation and advertisement, and a redirect
message.
By defining neighbor discovery functions in terms of ICMPv6 messages,
additional ...