Design And Implementation Of NETCONF-based Network Configuration Management System

As the most basic function of network management, configuration management is a very important research topic for the internet. Currently the simple network management protocol (SNMP) is the most widely used technology in network management, but it can't satisfy the requirements of configuration management due to its limitations. Recent years there have been some researches on XML-based network configuration management, which is more powerful on data modeling, data transmission and configuration management operations. IETF issued the formal definition of NETCONF as the standard of XML-based network configuration management in December 2006.Combining with the requirements of network configuration management, this paper makes further researches on the contents and the research situation of the NETCONF protocol. Then a design scheme of NETCONF-based network configuration management system is proposed, which uses a client/server architecture model composing by the manager and the agent. The stratified and Object-Oriented design patterns are adopted to reduce the coupling between modules and improve the extensibility of the system. And the SSL protocol is adopted to ensure the security and integrality of the communications between the manager and the agent.Finally, this paper gives the implementation of the design scheme, which uses both WINDOWS and UNIX as the development platforms to satisfy the requirements of portability. It can manage the configurations of system, interface and routing table. And it supports all NETCONF operations and capabilities exchange as well as auditing, concurring managements and transaction mechanisms including confirmed commit, rollback on error and rollback on timeout.