Neighbor Discovery Protocol - Technical Details

Technical Details

NDP defines the following five ICMPv6 packet types:

  1. Router Solicitation
  2. Router Advertisement
  3. Neighbor Solicitation
  4. Neighbor Advertisement
  5. Redirect

These messages are used to provide the following functionality:

  • Router discovery: hosts can locate routers residing on attached links.
  • Prefix discovery: hosts can discover address prefixes that are on-link for attached links.
  • Parameter discovery: hosts can find link parameters (e.g., MTU).
  • Address autoconfiguration: stateless configuration of addresses of network interfaces.
  • Address resolution: mapping between IP addresses and link-layer addresses.
  • Next-hop determination: hosts can find next-hop routers for a destination.
  • Neighbor unreachability detection (NUD): determine that a neighbor is no longer reachable on the link.
  • Duplicate address detection (DAD): nodes can check whether an address is already in use.
  • Redirect: router can inform a node about better first-hop routers.
  • Recursive DNS Server (RDNSS) and DNS Search List (DNSSL) assignment via a router advertisement (RA) options. This is a new feature and not widely supported by clients.

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