Improvements in ND (IPv6) over ARP (IPv4)
As explained in Chapter 26, the IPv6 neighboring protocol ND has a very different design from ARP. Here are some of the improvements in ND:
ND is a function provided by ICMPv6, a powerful protocol that covers the functionalities of ARP, ICMPv4, and more. In particular, as we saw in the section "Neighboring Protocols" in Chapter 26, putting ND into ICMP allows ND to take advantage of any L3 feature provided, notably encryption.
ND uses multicast solicitations rather than broadcasts. The multicast address to use is derived from the target address to solicit, which means that only those hosts that register for a given IP multicast address receive the associated solicitation requests. In a big network, this can drastically reduce the number of solicitations that hosts receive and discard because they are not the target.
ND uses a neighbor unreachability detection algorithm to detect dead neighbors. This is not part of every ARP implementation, but as we saw in Chapter 27, Linux implements it for ARP as well.
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