IPv6 Address Types

Unicast IPv6 Addresses

Link-Local addresses start with FE80::/64; Used for Neighbor Discovery Unique-Local addresses start with FD00::/8; Private Address Space (e.g. 172.16 range in IPv4); the 40 bit Global ID in this is not summarized and hence they are /8 type of addresses; the Global ID is unique and identifies each site within the organization Global Unicast addresses start with 0x2 or 0x3 followed by a 44 bit Global Routing Prefix (Actually its a 45 bit identifier if the last bit of the first nibble is included); these are usually summarized or aggregated with /64

Special IPv6 Addresses

Unspecified address is indicated as all 0s or :: ; its used as the source address when no address has been determined yet. In order to send Router Solicitation messages the node might use the Unspecified Address if the actual has not been configured yet;A router is not supposed to forward packets with Source address set as Unspecified address Loopback address is indicated as ::1

Multicast IPv6 Addresses

Multicast addresses start with FF as the first 8 bits. The next 4 bits indicate Flags and the next 4 indicate the Scope. The remaining 112 bits are used to denote the Group ID The Flags bits contain 3 types of flags namely the T flag bit to denote if the address is permanent or transient, the P bit which indicates if the prefix is based on a Unicast address or not (What really its used for?) and the R bit which tells whether the address contains an embedded Rendezvous Point. The scope of multicast addresses can take 6 different values. The concept of scope is explicitly indicated in the multicast addresses whereas its implicit in Unicast and Anycast addresses. Scope is defined as the size of a topological region whereas the Zone is an instance of the topological region. So an address with link-local scope will not be forwarded beyond the link. Since the same non-global address (link-local addresses in particular) can be within the same scope but in different zones (two interfaces in a router serving different networks having the same link-local address), each Zone is identified by a Zone ID. Hence link-local addresses are addressed by adding a Zone ID to the end of the address in order to uniquely distinguish each link The different types of scope defined for IPv6 are o Node-local/Interface-local => used to reach the same node o Link-local => used to communicate with other devices

Site-Local => used to communicate b/w devices within the private networks Admin-local Organization-local => used to communicate b/w devices within the same organization o Global => addresses reachable on the Internet Following multicast addresses have been defined to indicate the different types of multicast-scope for nodes and routers o FF01::1 => node-local scope for all-nodes multicast address (loopback of the multicast packet) o FF02::1 => link-local scope for all-nodes multicast address (replacement for the IPv4 broadcast and directed broadcast address, also used in the Neighbor Solicitation Process) o FF01::2 => node-local scope for all-router multicast address o FF02::2 => link-local scope for all-router multicast address o FF05::2 => site-local scope for all-router multicast address Ethernet MAC addresses used as destination multicast addresses for corresponding multicast IP addresses start with 0x33-33 and the remaining 4 bytes are mapped as is from the last 32 bits of the IPv6 Multicast address Solicited-node multicast addresses are shown as FF02:0:0:0:0:0:FF/104; the remaining 24 bits are taken from the anycast/unicast address assigned o o o

Anycast IPv6 Addresses

Subnet-Router Anycast address starts with the prefix length number of bits of the address of the interface and the remaining bits set to 0. For e.g., If the interface address is 2001:db8:100:f101:210:a4ff:fee3:9566/64 then the subnet-router anycast address for this would be 2001:db8:100:f101/64. Only 64 bits were used since the prefix length was 64 in this case