Managing Heterogeneous Networks Using NETCONF

The Network management became more and more complex with the advancement of heterogeneous network devices. The efficient configuration management of heterogeneous network devices from different vendors is a great challenge. During the past twenty years, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) as an industrial standard has played a very important role in managing the computer networks. However, as the networks are growing day by day, SNMP could not satisfy the need of configuration Management for huge networks. In 2006, the IETF released a new protocol called Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) [1] for configuration management to overcome the shortcomings of the SNMP and other management engines like Command Line interface (CLI) which is predominantly used for device configuration at present.