A Transitional NETCONF-Based Network Management Design

The Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) is a new network management protocol proposed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to solve the problem that SNMP can't do efficient configuration management. However, there hasn't been any standard data model provided for NETCONF, which prevents the development and wide use of the protocol. On the other hand, most of the current devices still support Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and NETCONF agent hasn't been widely applied. This paper presents a transitional NETCONF-based network management design method which includes the translation from Management Information Base (MIB) to XML Schema Definition (XSD) for NETCONF before new data model emerges and a NETCONF/SNMP gateway for NETCONF manager to access data from SNMP devices. This proposal can implement the NETCONF-based network management under the condition that NETCONF configuration data model hasn't been standardized and the interface of NETCONF hasn't been widely used.