Despite the existence of stateless autoconfiguration for IPv6 (RFC 2462), there is still a need for DHCP in IPv6. DHCP can be a complement to the stateless autoconfiguration where it can supply hosts with DNS, NTP and other configuration data. DHCP can also take care of address allocations, and replace stateless autoconfiguration completely.

Using the same address allocation system as DHCPv4 for IPv6 would mean that 264 addresses are available per link. Thus a stripped down “lightweight” version of DHCPv6 (stateless DHCPv6) was also developed but this is in fact a different protocol to DHCPv6. However, it is based on DHCPv6 in order to save design and implementation time.