Configuration Guide Configuring IPv6
3 Configuring IPv6
3.1 Overview
As the Internet develops rapidly and IPv4 address space is becoming exhausted, IPv4 limitations become more and more
obvious. At present, many researches and practices on Internet Protocol Next Generation (IPng) have been conducted.
The IPng working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has formulated an IPng protocol named IP Version
6 (IPv6), which is described in RFC 2460.
The IPv6 function is not supported on AP110-W currently.
Main Features
 Larger Address Space
Compared with 32 bits in an IPv4 address, the length of an IPv6 address is extended to 128 bits. Therefore, the address
space has approximately 2
128
addresses. IPv6 adopts a hierarchical address allocation mode to support address
allocation of multiple subnets from the Internet core network to intranet subnet.
 Simpler Packet Header Format
Since the design principle of the IPv6 packet header is to minimize the overhead of the packet header, some non-key
fields and optional fields are removed from the packet header to the extended packet header. Therefore, although the
length of an IPv6 address is four times of that of an IPv4 address, the IPv6 packet header is only two times of the IPv4
packet header. The IPv6 packet header makes device forwarding more efficient. For example, with no checksum in the
IPv6 packet header, the IPv6 device does not need to process fragments (fragmentation is completed by the initiator).
 Efficient Hierarchical Addressing and Routing Structure
IPv6 uses a convergence mechanism and defines a flexible hierarchical addressing and routing structure. Multiple
networks at the same layer are represented as a uniform network prefix on the upstream device, greatly reducing routing
entries maintained by the device and routing and storage overheads of the device.
 Easy Management: Plug and Play (PnP)
IPv6 provides automatic discovery and auto-configuration functions to simplify management and maintenance of network
nodes. For example, Neighbor Discovery (ND), MTU Discovery, Router Advertisement (RA), Router Solicitation (RS), and
auto-configuration technologies provide related services for PnP. Particularly, IPv6 offers two types of auto-configuration:
stateful auto-configuration and stateless auto-configuration. In IPv4, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
realizes auto-configuration of the host IP address and related parameters. IPv6 inherits this auto-configuration service
from IPv4 and called it stateful auto-configuration (see DHCPv6). Besides, IPv6 also offers the stateless
auto-configuration service.During stateless auto-configuration, a host automatically obtains the local address of the link,
address prefix of the local device, and other related configurations.
 Security
As an optional extension protocol of IPv4, Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) is a part of IPv6 to provide security for IPv6
packets. At present, IPv6 provides two mechanisms: Authentication Header (AH) and Encapsulated Security Payload
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