Network working group T. Tsou
Internet Draft Huawei Technologies
Intended status: Informational November 28, 2009
Expires: 30 May, 2010
Network configuration problem statement
draft-tsou-network-configuration-problem-statement-01
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Abstract
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Internet-Draft network configuration problem statement November 2009
With the network evolution to all IP, the network configuration needs
to be enhanced because of large number of network devices and service
tunnels.
The existing IP network management mainly depends on manual
configuration. The cost will be very high if all these work are
performed manually and it is a great burden for service providers to
deploy and maintain such large scale IP networks.
This document discusses problems related to reducing network
configuration workload and transmission tunnel setup between network
devices and NMS (Network Management System).
Table of Contents
1. Introduction................................................2
2. Conventions used in this document...........................3
3. Configuration problems......................................3
3.1. Configuration workload in IP network...................3
3.2. Problems to be solved for network configuration........5
4. Security Considerations.....................................5
5. IANA Considerations.........................................6
6. References..................................................6
7. Acknowledgments.............................................6
1. Introduction
The mobile network and the fixed network are evolving towards ALL IP
network. Therefore, the number of IP network devices increases
rapidly. Following this, constructing IP network will take a lot of
efforts due to the large number of network devices.
Several issues of configuration in the existing network constructing
should be considered:
o It takes a lot of work to design the configuration scripts for the
large amount of network devices, which will often bring occasional
mistakes.
o The address and link of some IP network devices cannot be acquired.
So the network topology often changes from what is planned, and
the pre-designed configuration scripts of the network devices need
to be changed in network deployment phase.
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o Without DCN connection, the initial configuration scripts can only
be input locally or use MODEM/CF cards, which involve large amount
of manual work.
o The manual work cannot avoid mistakes which will cause failure of
network.
This document provides two problem statements related to large
network configuration workload.
2. Conventions used in this document
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119.
3. Configuration problems
With the network evolution to all IP, the network configuration needs
to be enhanced because of the large scale IP network.
IP network will have more and more network devices and service
tunnels. Therefore, constructing an IP network will take a lot of
effort due to the large number of network devices being configured
manually.
3.1. Configuration workload in IP network
In a typical IP network, e.g., LTE IP backhaul network, there will be
up to 16000 base stations, 20000 network devices and up to 200K
service tunnels.
In the existing configuration method, the configuration related work
includes:
o The engineer design of the configuration scripts of each device.
o The arrival time of engineers to the site of network devices.
o The engineer check of the network devices and links based on
network planning.
o Change of the configuration scripts by the engineer when network
topology changes unexpectedly.
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o The configuration scripts input to the network devices.
After network is configured and the network device is connected to
NMS, the service tunnels can be configured from NMS. Configuring
service tunnel from NMS is already defined which is not included in
this document.
The workload of network configuration in this typical scenario is
estimated and shown in figure 1.
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+-----------+----------+------------+--------+----------+---------+
|Project |Config. |Arrival time|link |Temporary |Config. |
| |design |of engineer |check |change of |input |
| | | | |Config. | |
+-----------+----------+------------+--------+----------+---------+
|work load |30min/ |60min/site |10min/ |30min/ |10min/ |
| |device | | device |device |device |
+-----------+----------+------------+--------+----------+---------+
|People |Senior | |skilled |Senior |Skilled |
|requirement|engineer | |engineer|engineer |engineer |
+-----------+----------+------------+--------+----------+---------+
|Total |30*20000 |20000*60 |10*20000|30*20000* |10*20000 |
|workload |=600000 |=1200000 |=200000 |0.3=180000|=200000 |
+-----------+----------+------------+--------+----------+---------+
Figure 1 Workload of network configuration in LTE IP backhaul network
The workload of arrival time of engineer to the network devices
occupies 51% of total and configuration design of the device occupies
33% of total. Instead of local operation, remote operation is
valuable for device or link check and configuration input to avoid
manual configuration in the locale. It is also very important to
reduce the large workload of device design and temporary
configuration change which takes 33% of all the workload and requires
senior engineers. The auto configuration based on network topology
and service model is important to be realized to reduce the
workload of network configuration.
Besides the above LTE IP backhaul network scenario, DSLAM or FTTx has
been the main stream in fixed network infrastructure which brings the
IP network into the access network edge.
Both the mobile network and the fixed network are evolving towards
ALL IP network. Therefore, from the core segment to aggregation and
till access edge, the number of IP devices increases rapidly.
The existing IP network management mainly depends on manual
configuration. It is a great burden for service operators to deploy
and maintain such large scale IP networks.
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3.2. Problems to be solved for network configuration
To reduce deploy and maintenance workload and cost, it is important
to bring in automatic and remote configuration mechanism for large
scale IP network.
One key goal is Plug & Play: simplicity on site manual configuration
is required. Once the cable is connected, the IP network devices
interconnect with each other quickly and get specific configuration
information from NMS.
There are some configuration problems to be solved to achieve Plug &
Play in the commissioning device stage:
o Initial configuration of management IP for network device
management;
o How can all IP network devices be connected to each other at IP
layer so that the management message can reach all the devices
after the cable is connected?
o How can network devices authenticate each other during the
automatic connection setup process?
o Interoperate among different heterogeneous equipments, e.g.
routers, switches, access gateways and etc
o Traversing equipments from different vendors may cause the problem
that the third party network blocks the Plug & Play of network
devices
o For service providers, the network devices are managed by network
management system (NMS). It is very difficult to add all the
device information into the NMS one by one and manually. Some kind
of auto discovery mechanism is needed to simplify the device
discovering.
4. Security Considerations
It is possible that there are security issues with the problems
stated above, e.g. the tunnel between NMS and network devices needs
mutual authentication before the tunnel is finally setup.
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5. IANA Considerations
None.
6. References
None.
7. Acknowledgments
Data on network configuration workload of LTE scenario was estimated
by Weihua, CHI.
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Authors' Addresses
Tina Tsou (editor)
Huawei Technologies
Section F, Huawei Industrial Base
Bantian Longgang, Shenzhen 518129
P.R. China
Phone: +86 755 28972912
Email: tena@huawei.com
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