Design And Implementation Of The Unified Network Equipment Configuration Platform

With the development of the Internet,the cultivation of network talents pose more and more stringent requirements on the environment,and it is more and more important to offer researchers with fully configurable/automated and flexibly controllable computer network experiment platform.Nonetheless,with the emerging of new network technologies and devices,the complexity of the testbed network keeps increasing constantly,and system heterogeneity is becoming more and more common.Network devices of various types and with various configuration specifications are incorporated in the system.On the other hand,it is common that different experiment scenarios require differently network environments.To offer such heterogeneity and diversity,manual configuration is required in traditional network device configuration procedure.However,this method not only has low efficiency,but is also prone to human errors,due to the distributed deployment of network devices and the heterogeneity of device specifications and control protocols.Manual configuration results in inflexible and non-automatic network management and configuration,which not only encumbers related researches of innovative network technologies,but also hinders the development of the network experiment platform itself.To facilitate innovative network researches and evaluation as well as the development of the experiment platform,it is significant to develop a unified network device configuration technology,which will not only have a great impact on the development of network management technology,but also comply with the development trend of current network experiment platforms.The configuration technology to be proposed should be able to flexibly configure and manage network resources and swiftly set up the experiment environment,according to specific user demands.This project aim at resolving the tight coupling of the control plane and the data plane in traditional network devices.By decoupling the control and data planes,we can implement in the control plane the configuration and management of network resources by selecting configuration technologies that are suitable for the characteristics of different devices,configuring and managing network devices in a SDN-like manner,thus realizing configuration transparency to the management staff.Based on related research on the current configuration and management methods,in this project,we propose to abstract network topological information as database entries.We model the network view by mapping these entries to different properties of the devices in the platform.By integrating and implementing related technologies,we develop different configuration modules based on the general data model,in order to realize configuration support for different devices,including Netconf-enabled devices,OpenFlow devices,virtualized devices and also traditional devices with CLI-based configuration interfaces.The proposed system not only supports exploration of new technology and devices,and also deepens the configuration method of the most widely adopted traditional physical devices.Specifically,the developed CLI configuration template motivates a configuration method based on templates,enabling the extensibility of the system.In the mean time,the system also incorporates a northbound interface,in order to realizes the integration with other control plane components of the platform.This integration will greatly help achieve the goal of automatic network device deployment in the experiment platform.