Communication Networks - Assignment 3

Network level: IPv6

Students Name: Oscar Fernandez Jardí

To take into account before doing these exercises:

Homework assignments are an integral part of this course. You are expected to complete your work
on time and in an honest manner. You may collaborate with other students. However, you should
write up and hand in your assignment separately, indicating in which parts and with whom you have
collaborated. Failing to do that will be considered as cheating or plagiarism, and the student will be
subject to disciplinary actions. The following list would help students to be aware of the related rules
and obligations:
 Do not submit work that is not entirely yours, i.e., use of another student’s essay or use of a
downloaded essay from the Internet.

 Acknowledge all assistance received, including help from friends or others in terms of
proofreading, suggestions or information.

 Do not lend your work to other students unless you feel certain they will not use it
dishonestly.

 When in doubt about any practice, ask the teachers. Do not rely on friends, relatives or
fellow students for information about what is acceptable academic practice.

 When material you read impresses you, be particularly careful to use your own words.

 Cite sources whenever you use the words of another.

 Whenever you copy a text use quotation marks: "Literal text of a source".

 Make sure that you are able to explain any part of your work if asked by the teacher.

This assignment represents the 7,5% of the final mark of the course.
In the theoretical questions, answer approximately in the blank spaces provided for writing.

Communication Networks 1
Exercise 1 (1,5%):
Most computers are IPv6 ready. Execute ifconfig -a or ipconfig /all in your computer and answer:
 Which is your MAC address? The MAC address is 80-32-53-64-D0-5C
 Which IPv6 address do you have? The IPv6 address is fe80::7111:e12f:6d67:2957%10
 Is it Global Unicast or Link Local? It is a Link Local because of the fe80 prefix.
 Which is its Interface ID? is it based on the MAC address or it is random? The interference
ID is 00-01-00-01-25-E1-D0-E7-38-22-E2-0C-A6-3A. This case is not based on the MAC
address, because the last digits do not correspond to MAC address, so it is random.
 Which are the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of your loopback interface? The loop back in IPV4 is
127.0.0.1 and the loop back in IPv6 is 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 or ::1.

Exercise 2 (1,5%):
Answer these questions:
 Why does the IPv6 header not include a checksum?
The IPv6 header does not include a checksum because an IPv6 router does not need to
recalculate the checksum to verify if the packet header is corrupt. In consequence, this is
efficient in terms of processing time and improves the packet forwarding in terms of speed.
 Explain the difference between strong and week host behaviour in the transmission of IPv6
datagrams (perform some research by yourselves).
By means of a strong host behaviour, a system that is not acting as a router cannot send or
receive datagrams on a given interface unless the destination/source IP in the datagram
(packet) is assigned to the interface. Contrary, in the weak host behaviour this restriction
does not apply. For instance, Windows XP and Windows 2003 use the weak host behaviour
on all IPv4 interfaces and the strong host behaviour on all IPv6 interfaces.
 Explain a use case when you would make use of the "flow label" field of the IPv6 header.
A good example would be a determined source which can request non-default QoS (Quality of
Service) or real time service.

Exercise 3 (1,5%):

Communication Networks 2
Read CN3-Reading-RFC4862.StatelessAutoconfiguration and describe the autoconfiguration function
of IPv6 devices.
The autoconfiguration process includes generating a link-local address, generating global addresses
via stateless address autoconfiguration and the Duplicate Address Detection procedure to verify the
uniqueness of the addresses on a link.
This way, the stateless mechanism allows a host to generate its own addresses using a combination
of locally available information advertised by routers, which advertise prefixes that identify the
subnets associated with a link, while hosts generate an interface identifier that uniquely identifies an
interface on a subnet.
To ensure that all configured addresses are likely to be unique on a given link, nodes run a duplicate
address detection algorithm on addresses before assigning them to an interface.
The autoconfiguration process specified in this document applies only to hosts and not routers so
that, since hosts autoconfiguration uses information advertised by routers, routers need to be
configured by some other means.
Concerning about the creation of a link local address, there are several ways that interfaces can be
enabled:
- Interface initialized at system start-up time.
- Interface reinitialized after a temporary interface failure.
- Interface attached to a link for the first time.
- Interface becomes enabled by a system management after being disabled.

Exercise 4 (1,5%):
With the Wireshark, open the file CN3-Traces1-Ping6WithAddrRes and analyse what you see.
Answer these questions:
 Which is the scope of the involved addresses?
If we take a look at the trace, we can easily realise that the source corresponds to a local
address and the destination corresponds to a global address.
The source address is fe80::b55d:f77b:b4f7:4f63 and the destination address is
ff02::1:ff07:2179.
As it is seen in the picture, the are two more addresses, source and destination, respectively,
that are changing sequentially by the first two addresses. These new source and destination
addresses are fe80::21b:21ff:fe07:2179 and fe80::b55d:f77b:b4f7:4f63.
Before going in depth to analyse the IG bit performance, it is mandatory to clarify what the IG
bit task is about. So basically, the IG bit distinguishes if the MAC address is a unicast MAC
address or is a multicast address (i.e. broadcast).
If we analyse the frames, by means of the first message we can see that the IG bit and the LG bit
are 0 in source but 1 in destination, meaning that, the package which is being sent goes
directly to a group address.

Communication Networks 3
 If now we click on the second frame, we would see that in both source and destination
addresses, the IG bit is 0. This means that the message is though to be sent to an individual
address.

 Which kind of messages can you see and what are they for?
The two main messages to be analysed are:
- Neighbour solicitation: this kind of messages are used by nodes to determine the link
layer address of a neighbour, or to verify that a neighbour is still reachable via a cached
link layer address.
- Neighbour advertisement: these messages, contrary, are used to respond a neighbour
solicitation message among other useful utilities:
1. It informs about if a message has been sent from a router to a host.
2. It informs if it is an answer to a unicast neighbour solicitation or to a multicast
solicitation.
3. Indicates the receiver to overwrite the input at the cache because of the new
MAC address need.

Exercise 5 (1,5%):
With the Wireshark, open the file CN3-Traces2-ICMP6.
If you connected your computer to the network in which these traces where taken, which IPv6
addresses (link local and global unicast) do you think that your computer would autoconfigure with?
The main frames we need to analyse are the router advertisement if we want our computer to be
autoconfigured. Basically, these messages are answers to the router’s solicitation messages.

Communication Networks 4
As it can be seen, the 45 th frame results to be the Router Advertisement. The source and destination
names are ProCurve_db:1d:00 and IPv6mcast_01, respectively. Taking a look to the LG and IG bits,
we can realise that the frame’s origin is a link-local address and the frame’s destiny is a link-local
scope all-nodes multicast address.
If we take a look at the Hop Limit, the number 255 ensures that the packet has not been sent
through a router.

If now we take a look at the image above, we see that the managed address configuration is not set,
meaning that, the mechanism which is being applied is the studied stateless address configuration.

Communication Networks 5