Design And Implementation Of Prototype System For NETCONF Protocol

The continual growth of telecommunications and data networks in terms of size andservice functions result in increased complexity of the network management process. Thelegacy approach of Command-Line Interface (CLI) is a vendor-dependent approach, andthe lack of standard CLIs prevents interoperability of equipment from different vendors.The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is primarily used for network faultmanagement and performance management, while its application in configurationmanagement is very limited, especially in system configuration (involving multiple nodes)and service provisioning. The weaknesses of CLI and SNMP lead to investigatingalternative approaches to network management.The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed a new XML-based networkmanagement protocol, called NETCONF, to manage diverse network devices manufacturedby different vendors. NETCONF protocol is a major step towards an automated XML-Basednetwork management system. However, a major issue of NETCONF is a lack of support fromthe industry, and few publications on the NETCONF implementation.In order to support basic capability of NETCONF protocol, a prototype system forNETCONF is designed and implemented. Firstly, we detailedly study the NETCONFprotocol and propose the requirement analysis, and the XML Schema language isconsidered for NETCONF-based data modeling. Then, selecting the embedded devicesoftware platform as the development environment, we implement mechanisms andprocesses of transport layer, Remote Procedure Call layer, operating layer and contentlayer of NETCONF Protocol. NETCONF Protocol achieved in this paper is a simpleprototype system which provides basic capabilities defined in RFC6241and supports twodifferent transport mechanisms for NETCONF to send the XML-based configuration data.The first transport mechanism is NETCONF OVER telnet/SSH/console, and the secondone is NETCONF OVER HTTP/TLS.