Substituting COPS-PR: an evaluation of NETCONF and SOAP for policy provisioning

The COPS-PR protocol has been defined by the IETF to provide policy provisioning in networks managed through the policy-based network management approach. Although some network players already ship their devices with proper COPS-PR support, there is a trend in the industry and in the IETF of discontinuing COPS-PR as a policy protocol. Meanwhile, two other protocols, namely NETCONF and SOAP, have been seriously considered in the network management field. This paper proposes and evaluates both NETCONF and SOAP as substitutes for COPS-PR, presenting how these protocols can be used for policy provisioning. The performance evaluation of NETCONF and SOAP against COPS-PR addresses two main aspects: network usage as a result of protocol overhead, and protocol delay as a result of protocol message processing. This study shows that both NETCONF and SOAP are interesting and feasible replacements for COPS-PR, but require appropriate modeling when deployed in networks