Research Of NETCONF-Based Network Configuration Management Agent

As network grow more complex and the sharp increase of type and amount of network devices, it is increasingly becoming an important issue of how to make an effective automatic configuration on devices. The main approach to managing devices currently is Command Line Interfaces (CLIs). whichi are vendor-specific and user-oriented, not application-oriented. While SNMP works well for monitoring network devices, it is not a good solution for configuration management, which is lack of enough automatic configuration operations and hard to construct complex configuration data models and so on. The absence of automation and standardization of current configuration makes it difficult to manage network efficiently and without errors.To improve the current situation of configuration management and meet the new needs of configuration management, The IETF formed the NETCONF Working Group to standardize network configuration and approved a configuration management protocol called NETCONF in December 2006. As a XML-based protocol, NETCONF provides not only the mechanisms for all basic configuration management tasks, such as installing, querying, manipulating and deleting the configurations of network devices ,but also automated configuration management and robust configuration changes. So it is considered as the development direction of next network configuration management and is being paid more and more attention.This thesis firstly analyzes the current network configuration management situation. Then it summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of configuration management approaches and new needs of configuration management. After a detailed introduction about NETCONF, it puts forward an overall structure of NETCONF-based configuration management. According to the NETCONF protocol structure, the paper then focuses on the design and implements of configuration management agent. Finally, we conclude this thesis and make an outlook of the following research.