IPv6 Address Types

IPv6 has three types of address and they are categorized as follow:

• Unicast address - data packet is delivered to a single destination.
• Multicast - data packet is delivered to multiple destinations.
• Anycast address - data packet is delivered to the closest destination.

It should be noted that unlike IPv4, IPv6 doesn't use Broadcast but instead, relies on Multicast to deliver messages to multiple destinations.

Unicast & anycast addresses are further broken down into the following sub-categories:

• Link-local - all nodes are on the same subnet.  This is the equivalent to the 169.254.0.0/16 address.
• Site-local - all nodes belongs to the same site.  This is the equivalent to the RFC 1918 - Private Address space.
• Global - all nodes are globally routable.  This is the equivalent to IPv4's public address space.

Besides that, IPv6 also have a few special addresses: 

• Loopback address
• Unspecified address