An Empirical Study of the NETCONF Protocol

This paper presents an overview and empirical study of NETCONF, which is a new network management protocol approved by IETF in December 2006. The traditional approaches of CLI, SNMP, and CORBA are discussed, along with their deficiencies in network management. In this paper we present an empirical study based on a standard NETCONF implementation. We highlight the major capabilities of NETCONF, which is a document-oriented approach based on XML, and how these capabilities could be used to address the challenges of configuration management in a complex network environment. To demonstrate the NETCONF capability, we installed an open source implementation of NETCONF, EnSuite (Yencap), on our lab Linux environment. Our preliminary results show that NETCONF provides more functionality (more advanced features), and is more efficient (single transaction for complex configuration data), more secure (embedded in the transport protocol), and easier to develop new services than CLI and SNMP.