Neighbor Discovery Protocol, Part 1: The History

IPv4 networks are interconnected with routing protocols to move data between networks of different institutions.  An institution's network might be subdivided into sub-networks or 'subnets' that also use routing protocols at the IP later, but inside a subnet IPv4 needs to interact with another protocol called ARP.  The Address Resolution Protocol is another old protocol used to help two PCs connect to each other by mapping Ethernet(MAC)addresses (Layer 2) to IPv4 addresses (Layer 3).  Computers keep track of these addresses in small tables and one can almost universally look at this table on a command line by typing 'arp -a', so give it a shot to see what I mean..

ARP uses Ethernet broadcasts to find machines who have a specific IPv4 address.  Essentially, one PC sends a particular 'request' packet out on the network to a specific Ethernet address which is heard by all devices on a subnet, and waits for responses which are directly sent to the requester from a station that knows.  Because of this behavior, ARP is sometimes considered a layer violation, although a necessary one.

There are several issues with this protocol which makes it unwelcome in the IPv6 space.

• Its not a pure IP solution.  We don't like mixing our Ethernet and our IPv4, and we don't need to in IPv6 if we fix this right.
• It relies on broadcasts, which we'd like to minimize if at all possible because IPv6 makes our subnets real big and we don't want network-wide broadcasts on real big networks.
• There is a lot more that can be done with the idea of mapping IPs in a subnet, but ARP only maps IP addresses to physical MAC addresses.  Its a one trick pony. 

IPv6 addressed these problems with a new protocol, NDP,or the Neighbor Discovery Protocol. More in Part 2 tomorrow.