# NDP

The Neighbor Discovery Protocol - NDP - is an [IPv6](/glossary/i/ipv6) protocol used for discovery and redirect similar to [ARP](/glossary/a/arp) and [ICMP](/glossary/i/icmp) for [IPv4](/glossary/i/ipv4).

It is used to handle address configuration, node discovery, address determination, duplicate addresses detection, location of available routers and [DNS](/glossary/d/dns) servers, address prefix discovery, and maintainance of reachability information.

### Packets

NDP defines five ICMPv6 packet types for communication:

* [Neighbor Advertisement](/glossary/n/neighbor_advertisement)

* [Neighbor Solicitation](/glossary/n/neighbor_solicitation)

* [Router Advertisement](/glossary/r/router_advertisement)

* [Router Solicitation](/glossary/r/router_solicitation)

* [Network Redirect](/glossary/n/network_redirect)


### Statuses

* [NDP status](/glossary/n/ndp_statuses)