IPv6 Core Protocols Implementation

5 Neighbor Discovery and Stateless Address Autoconfiguration

5.1 Introduction

A network layer protocol often needs to access link-layer information when communication takes place at the network layer among different nodes. For example, a node connected to an Ethernet link needs to know the Ethernet address of a remote node when it communicates with that remote node at the network layer. IPv4 uses the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) for this purpose. While ARP works quite well, several drawbacks have been pointed out from operational experiences, such as the dependency on expensive link-level broadcasting.

The internet user base has grown dramatically over the past decade and so has the network complexity. Configuring network and networked ...