Windows 7 / Networking

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Identifying IPv6 Address Types

As Table 1 shows, you can quickly determine which type of IPv6 address you are dealing with by looking at the beginning part of the address-that is, the high-order bits of the address. Tables 2 and 3 also show examples of common IPv6 addresses that you can recognize directly from their colon-hexadecimal representation.

Table-1 Identifying IPv6 Address Types Using High-Order Bits and Address Prefix

Address Type	High-Order Bits	Address Prefix
Global unicast	001	2000::/3
Link-local unicast	1111 1110 10	FE80::/64
Unique local unicast	1111 1101	FD00::/8
Multicast	1111 1111	FF00::/8

Table-2 Identifying Common IPv6 Multicast Addresses

Function	Scope	Representation
All-nodes multicast	Interface-local	FF01::1
All-nodes multicast	Link-local	FF02::1
All-nodes multicast	Interface-local	FF01::2
All-nodes multicast	Link-local	FF02::2
All-nodes multicast	Site-local	FF05::2

Table-3 Identifying Loopback and Unspecified IPv6 Addresses

Function	Representation
Unspecified address (no address)	::
Loopback address	::1

Note For information on IPv6 address types used by different IPv6 transition technologies, see the section titled "Planning for IPv6 Migration" later in this tutorial.