4. Address Scope

4. Address Scope

Every IPv6 address other than the unspecified address has a specific scope; that is, a topological span within which the address may be used as a unique identifier for an interface or set of interfaces. The scope of an address is encoded as part of the address, as specified in [1].

For unicast addresses, this document discusses two defined scopes:

• Link-local scope, for uniquely identifying interfaces within (i.e., attached to) a single link only.

• Global scope, for uniquely identifying interfaces anywhere in the Internet.

The IPv6 unicast loopback address, ::1, is treated as having link-local scope within an imaginary link to which a virtual "loopback interface" is attached.

The unspecified address, ::, is a special case. It does not have any scope because it must never be assigned to any node according to [1]. Note, however, that an implementation might use an implementation dependent semantics for the unspecified address and may want to allow the unspecified address to have specific scopes. For example, implementations often use the unspecified address to represent "any" address in APIs. In this case, implementations may regard the unspecified address with a given particular scope as representing the notion of "any address in the scope". This document does not prohibit such a usage, as long as it is limited within the implementation.

[1] defines IPv6 addresses with embedded IPv4 addresses as being part of global addresses. Thus, those addresses have global scope, with regard to the IPv6 scoped address architecture. However, an implementation may use those addresses as if they had other scopes for convenience. For instance, [6] assigns link-local scope to IPv4 auto-configured link-local addresses (the addresses from the prefix 169.254.0.0/16 [7]) and converts those addresses into IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses in order to perform destination address selection among IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. This would implicitly mean that the IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses equivalent to the IPv4 auto-configuration link-local addresses have link-local scope. This document does not preclude such a usage, as long as it is limited within the implementation.

Anycast addresses [1] are allocated from the unicast address space and have the same scope properties as unicast addresses. All statements in this document regarding unicast apply equally to anycast.

For multicast addresses, there are fourteen possible scopes, ranging from interface-local to global (including link-local). The interface-local scope spans a single interface only; a multicast address of interface-local scope is useful only for loopback delivery of multicasts within a single node; for example, as a form of inter-process communication within a computer. Unlike the unicast loopback address, interface-local multicast addresses may be assigned to any interface.

There is a size relationship among scopes:

• For unicast scopes, link-local is a smaller scope than global.

• For multicast scopes, scopes with lesser values in the "scop" subfield of the multicast address (Section 2.7 of [1]) are smaller than scopes with greater values, with interface-local being the smallest and global being the largest.

However, two scopes of different size may cover the exact same region of topology. For example, a (multicast) site may consist of a single link, in which both link-local and site-local scope effectively cover the same topological span.