Addressing Architecture of IPv6

IPv6 has a large address space because of its 128-bit address scheme. As discussed in this chapter, several parts of this address space are used for the functions of the protocol itself such link-local, site-local, multicast address, multicast assigned address, solicited-node multicast address, loopback, unspecified, and IPv4-compatible IPv6 address. Although several parts of the 128-bit address are used, only a small percentage (less than 2%) of the whole space is reserved for those functions.

Table 2-26 presents an overview of spaces allocated compared to IPv6's entire addressing space. The first column, Prefix in Binary, represents the high-order 16-bit of each allocation. The character x means that these bits ...

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