Improving Network Services Configuration Management

This paper proposes a configuration management framework to improve the configuration of network services. Configuring a network service is difficult and error-prone especially when dealing with hundreds or thousands of various networking devices. Misconfiguration is common and leads to dramatic impacts on network stability. The existing configuration frameworks such as NETwork CONFiguration (NETCONF) protocol focuses on the interaction patterns between managers and agents with limited support for high-level functionalities. This makes hard for network developers to build effective management systems. Our proposed framework complements NETCONF framework by introducing a middle-level abstraction called Configuration Semantic Model (CSM) that provides a global view of service configuration process and coordinates the configuration of inter-dependent network devices. In this paper, we provide an overview of our configuration semantic modeling and then describe two case studies to evaluate the proposed framework.