IPv6 Essentials

If you are familiar with IPv4, the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) for IPv4 is probably a good friend of yours: it gives important information about the health of the network. ICMPv6 is the version that works with IPv6. It reports errors if packets cannot be processed properly and sends informational messages about the status of the network. For example, if a router cannot forward a packet because it is too large to be sent out on another network, it sends an ICMP message back to the originating host. The source host can use this ICMP message to determine a better packet size and then resend the data. ICMP also performs diagnostic functions, such as the well-known ping , which uses ICMP Echo Request and Echo Reply messages to test availability of a node.

ICMPv6 is much more powerful than ICMPv4 and contains new functionality, as described in this chapter. For instance, the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) function that manages multicast group memberships with IPv4 has been incorporated into ICMPv6. The same is true for the Address Resolution Protocol/Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (ARP/RARP) function used in IPv4 to map layer two addresses to IP addresses (and vice versa). Neighbor Discovery (ND) is introduced; it uses ICMPv6 messages to determine link-layer addresses for neighbors attached to the same link, find routers, keep track of which neighbors are reachable, and detect changed link-layer addresses. New message types have been defined to allow for simpler renumbering of networks and updating of address information between hosts and routers. ICMPv6 also supports Mobile IPv6, which is described in Chapter 11. ICMPv6 is part of IPv6, and it must be implemented fully by every IPv6 node. The protocol is defined in RFC 4443. Neighbor Discovery is defined in RFC 2461.