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ICMPv6 & Neighbor Discovery Protocol

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NDP: ARP's IPv6 replacement

IPv6 eliminates ARP and replaces it with Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP), built on ICMPv6. NDP handles address-to-MAC mapping (Neighbor Solicitation/Advertisement), router discovery (RS/RA), and address configuration — all using multicast instead of broadcast.

This is a significant improvement: NDP targets a specific multicast group rather than flooding every device on the LAN.

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