Development of Management Interface to Configure Network Equipment

This paper studies the feasibility of a network equipment configuration API (application programming interface), which helps a configuration application configure network equipment without human intervention, and therefore remarkably reduces the network operator´s workload and the operational cost. Previously, network operators had to cope with various types of network equipment from several manufacturers or several versions of the same product from one manufacturer. This was tedious for network operators and was also not cost efficient. It was natural then, that a configuration application that configures every network product via the same interface was needed. However, the CLI (command line interface), the popular interface provided now in network equipment, is designed for human operators. Hence, it was unsuitable to incorporate CLI into configuration applications. Thus, middleware, or a unified control platform, which can configure all products by providing programmers with a unified API, was necessary. For this purpose, we developed an API based on the NETCONF protocol that was standardized by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). We also evaluated its effectiveness