Challenges to the New Network Management Protocol: NETCONF

In 2006, the IETF released its latest effort, NETCONF, a brand new network management protocol, which is based on the XML encoding method. The NETCONF protocol is thought to be able to meet the requirement of configuration management which SNMP fails to do well. The NETCONF protocol also performs better in other fields such as the efficiency, more flexible operations, etc. But, as a new protocol, NETCONF is not perfect either and it also has some shortcomings in several aspects. In this paper, some common problems and challenges in the field of network management which NETCONF has not efficiently solved are reviewed and a few pieces of suggestion will be given out.