Design and Implementation of NETCONF-Based Network Management System

The efficient configuration management of heterogeneous network devices from different vendors is a great challenge. The network configuration protocol (NETCONF) is presented as a new solution. It aims to overcome the shortcomings of simple network management protocol (SNMP) and command line interface (CLI) which are predominantly used for configuration tasks at present. This paper gives an architecture of NETCONF-based network management system and demonstrates its working principle. A prototype including a NETCONF manager and a NETCONF agent is implemented and then the performance analysis between NETCONF agent and SNMP agent are discussed. Experiment results shows that NETCONF agent has great advantages in processing large number of objects, which is more suitable for future network management systems.