CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

The present application claims priority to Chinese Patent Application No. 201910241512.X, entitled “IPV6 stateless address generation method and apparatus”, and filed on Mar. 28, 2019. The present application also claims priority to Chinese Patent Application No. 201910580274.5, entitled “IPV6 STATELESS ADDRESS AUTO-CONFIGURAITON METHOD, NETWORK DEVICE AND HOST”, and filed on Jun. 28, 2019. The entire contents of each of the above-listed applications are hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes.

BACKGROUND

An Internet Protocol Version 6 (referred to as IPv6) address includes a prefix and an interface identifier. The IPv6 address has a total length of 128 bits, and has the characteristic of huge address space. At present, IPv6 address allocation methods stipulated by existing communication protocols mainly include a stateful address allocation method and a stateless address allocation method.

In the stateful address allocation method, a special Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (referred to as DHCP) server needs to be configured. The DHCP server allocates an IPv6 address to a host. The host obtains the allocated IPv6 address from a DHCP client configured thereon.

In the stateless address allocation method, usually, a host monitors a router advertisement message sent by a network device, for example, a gateway, to obtain a prefix carried in the router advertisement message. In addition, the host needs to generate an interface identifier of the host. Then, the host generates an IPv6 address of the host according to the prefix and the interface identifier.

