Administrator Guide

Figure 48. Path MTU discovery process
IPv6 Neighbor Discovery
The IPv6 neighbor discovery protocol (NDP) is a top-level protocol for neighbor discovery on an IPv6 network.
In place of address resolution protocol (ARP), NDP uses “Neighbor Solicitation” and “Neighbor Advertisement” ICMPv6 messages for
determining relationships between neighboring nodes. Using these messages, an IPv6 device learns the link-layer addresses for neighbors
known to reside on attached links, quickly purging cached values that become invalid.
NOTE:
If a neighboring node does not have an IPv6 address assigned, it must be manually pinged to allow the IPv6
device to determine the relationship of the neighboring node.
NOTE: To avoid problems with network discovery, Dell EMC Networking recommends configuring the static route last
or assigning an IPv6 address to the interface and assigning an address to the peer (the forwarding router’s address)
less than 10 seconds apart.
With ARP, each node broadcasts ARP requests on the entire link. This approach causes unnecessary processing by uninterested nodes.
With NDP, each node sends a request only to the intended destination via a multicast address with the unicast address used as the last 24
bits. Other hosts on the link do not participate in the process, greatly increasing network bandwidth efficiency.
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IPv6 Routing