A

advertisement.

Routing or service updates sent by a router at specified intervals so that other routers and hosts on the link-local network can get information such as the network prefix, default router, and so on.

See also [router advertisement]

aggregatable global unicast address.

A unicast IPv6 address used for the generic IPv6 traffic on the IPv6 Internet. Represents the most important part of the whole IPv6 address space. Aggregatable global unicast address enables strict aggregation of routing prefixes to limit the size of the global Internet routing table.

aggregation.

The process by which many long IPv6 prefixes are summarized to form a shorter IPv6 prefix. Therefore, instead of having multiple long IPv6 prefixes in the global Internet routing table, there are only few short IPv6 prefixes.

anycast.

A source node sends a single packet to the nearest destination. Like multicast, anycast implies the concept of a group.

APNIC.

Asia Pacific Network Information Center. One of the three regional Internet registries in the world that can allocate production IPv6 address spaces to ISPs. APNIC covers Asia and Australia.

ARIN.

American Registry for Internet Numbers. One of the three regional Internet registries in the world that can allocate production IPv6 address spaces to ISPs. ARIN covers the Americas.

ARP.

Address Resolution Protocol. An Internet protocol used to map an IPv4 address to a MAC address. See RFC 826.

autoconfiguration.

See [stateless autoconfiguration]