Neighbor Discovery Protocol
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The Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) is a protocol in the Internet Protocol Suite used with IPv6. It operates in the Link Layer and is responsible for discovery of other nodes on the link, to determine the link layer addresses of other nodes, to find available routers, and maintain reachability information about the paths to other active neighbor nodes (RFC 4861, 2007).[1]
NDP performs functions for IPv6 similar to the way Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) and ICMP Router Discovery and Router Redirect protocols do for IPv4. However, it provides many improvements over its IPv4 counterparts (see RFC 4861, section 3.1), for example, it includes Neighbor Unreachability Detection (NUD), thus improving robustness of packet delivery in the presence of failing routers or links, or mobile nodes. NDP is more media (link type) independent than ARP.
[edit] Technical details
The Neighbor Discovery Protocol defines mechanisms for providing the following functionality:
NDP makes use of the following five ICMPv6 packet types:
