Research Of NETCONF-Based Agent With Secondary Development Interface

As the complexity of network structure increases, network configuration management becomes more and more important. How to effectively configure network devices in the increasingly expanding network environment has been brought into focus in network management. Currently, Command Line Interfaces is the most traditional network configuration method and is the most commonly used one by equipment vendors. However, this configuration method has some obvious defects. First and foremost, different equipment vendors use different commands with the same function, so that the standardized management of different types of devices cannot be carried out. Moreover, the configuration of Command Line Interface is so low in efficiency that it cannot meet the need of lot configuration. Although the application of SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) provides convenience for network monitoring management, the function of network configuration management is still so weak that it cannot meet the needs of configuring the large network.In order to overcome the shortcomings of the current network configuration and work out a more efficient one, IETF has set up NETCONF Working Group to study the next network configuration management protocol, introduced technologies related to XML into the protocol, and approved a landmark draft called RFC4741 in December 2006, which lays a basis for the establishment and completion of NETCONF-the next network configuration management protocol. Then the subsequent drafts form gradually. NETCONF provides richer and more powerful primitive operations to complete the network configuration management, and achieves the accurate positioning of the operational objectives with the assistance of the data presentation ability of XML. Besides, NETCONF NETMOD Working Group is revising and perfecting the unified data modeling language YANG for NETCONF. The standardization of YANG will bring a standardized format and grammar to the data description of underlying network. And the related technologies in hand can conveniently achieve the transformation from the traditional data model to YANG format, so as to carry out the integrated processing of data model.This thesis reviews the current related researches on network configuration management of companies home and abroad as well as standardized organizations, summarizes the four levels of NETCONF protocol respectively with functional analysis, and introduces the key part of each level in detail. Then from the perspective of expandability, it carries out a general and a hierarchical design of NETCONF agent, presents the functional block diagrams of the design and the flow charts of key operation, and introduces the implement of each module in NETCONF agent in two parts, i.e. the protocol itself and secondary development interface. Finally, it concludes the researches and makes an outlook, which creates available conditions for the further researches on the agent with secondary development interface based on NETCONF protocol.