IAB workshop on the Next Era of Network Management Operations (nemopsws)

Robert Wilton, Cisco Systems; Nick Corran, Cisco Systems

This document gives a perspective of where we believe the industry is with regarding to network management and telemetry based on Rob's experience as a recent IETF OPS Area Director for Network Management and our joint experience designing and implementing network management technologies for large IP/MPLS Internet scale backbone routers.

Kent Watsen

The current state of network management is not bad, but it can be improved. When thinking about the Next-Era of Network Management Operations, kent presents three thoughts.

Thomas Graf, Swisscom; Holger Keller, DT; Dan Voyer, Bell Canada; Paolo Lucente, NTT; Benoit Claise, Huawei; Rob Wilton, Cisco; Alex Huang-Feng and Pierre Francois, INSA Lyon

Agile Incremental Driven Development for Network Management

Rüdiger Geib; Dr. Martin Horneffer; Holger Keller; Nils Warnke

The outcome of RFC3535 is widely visible in today’s networks. After the IAB-Workshop in 2002 began a huge step away from traditional CLI-based towards easier programmable Network Management. Today there are lots of different possibilities and the industry formed the term API-driven Management. This was made possible by the development of Netconf and YANG. Especially YANG as an easy-to-use data modelling language created a lot of traction in many parts of the networking sector.

Luis M. Contreras, Telefonica; Roland Schott, Deutsche Telekom; Sabine Randriamasy, Nokia Bell Labs; Richard Yang, Yale University; Jordi Ros-Giralt, Qualcomm Europe, Inc.


Since the 2002 IAB workshop, network topologies have become significantly more complex. Cloud-based applications, edge-cloud applications, and the virtualization of network service functions require the selection of trans- mission paths that reflect both compute and communication capabilities to accommodate a new breadth of applications with stringent Quality of Experience requirements (e.g., artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and augmented reality). During the operational lifetime of a service, network management entities intervene at different levels of infrastructure that cover one or more domains. The infrastructure information they consume, therefore, needs to be simple, sufficient, and unambiguous. This paper explores potential standardization tracks for the definition and exposure of richer and more consistent infrastructure data spanning both compute and communication domains. It also addresses the promises and challenges of combining and abstracting this information.

Kristian Larsson; Kris Lambrechts; Ian Farrer

In 2002, the IAB organized a workshop on Network Management and the outcome was RFC3535. It's now been 20 years and it is time to evaluate what has been achieved as well as to look to the future.

Mohamed Boucadair, Orange; Luis Miguel Contreras Murillo, Telefonica; Oscar Gonzalez de Dios, Telefonica; Thomas Graf, Swisscom; Reshad Rahman, Equinix; Lionel Tailhardat, Orange

The IAB organized an important workshop to establish a dialog between network operators and protocol developers, and to guide the IETFfocus on work regarding network management. The outcome of that workshop was documented in the "IAB Network Management Workshop" (RFC 3535) which was instrumental for developing NETCONF and YANG, in particular.

20 years later, it is time to evaluate what has been achieved since then and identify the operational barriers for making these technologies widely implemented. Also, this document captures new requirements for network management operations.

Rob Shakir

To provide context for this submission: I began interacting with network equipment in 2001. I first wrote software that automated those interactions in approximately 2003. My career since has involved operating networks that range from being completely based on physical devices that are purchased from vendors who are well represented in the IETF, to those that are entirely realised in software running on Linux machines, to hybrids of the two.. The last 10+ years of my career has been focused on management of network systems. I have been the technical lead of the OpenConfig project – which has defined a number of technologies that have become widely adopted as network management interfaces, as well as aimed to take advantage of IETF technologies where possible.

Toerless Eckert, Futurewei Technologies; Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works

This is a position paper for the IAB 2024 NEMOPS workshop. It it intended to promote the experimentation and standardization direction of more self-aware and managing infrastructure to support more resilient and easier to manage network infrastructures.
This position paper outlines the problem space addressed by the ANIMA-WG in the IETF, which has released initial standards recommendations. However, these alone are insufficient without a robust network device-level implementation architecture to achieve the intended benefits. The paper also broadens the problem scope, encouraging exploration of alternative and complementary solutions that involve not only IETF contributions but also collaboration with other SDOs and open or proprietary network device development communities.

Parisa Foroughi and Laurent Ciavaglia, Nokia

Bridging the knowledge gap between network engineers and AI scientists is essential for advancing automation and moving towards automated observability Therefore, as a first step, the main question is: How can we empower these two domains to leverage each other's expertise and create a seamless data ecosystem?

Michael Scharf

This short positioning papers analyzes the status quo of network management in Cyber-Physical Networks that use the Internet Protocol (IP) but differ to the general Internet. Examples include IP-based industrial networks and modern automotive networks. The use of IP in these networks currently evolves significantly, and this inherently affects network management solutions. Yet, in these industry sectors the IETF network management solutions are only used partly, or not at all. This paper discusses potential reasons and raises questions regarding the future evolution of network management operations in the IETF.

Jaime Jiménez

In this paper we provide an overview of the Lightweight Machine-to-Machine (LwM2M) protocol, a standard de- vice and service management protocol built on top of CoAP for remote management and configuration of devices. We highlight its role in IoT device management and its use of key IETF standards such as CoAP, DTLS,and OSCORE. While network management protocols like SNMP, RESTCONF, and CORECONF focus on monitoring and configuring endpoints within the network, LwM2M extends these capabilities by managing the entire lifecycle of individual devices, including con- figuration, control, and maintenance. We also discuss LwM2M’s architecture, data model and communication interfaces. Last, we also introduce recent advancements in the protocol.

Wes Hardaker

This story is not about SNMP [rfc3410], even though it’s in the title. It’s about my history in starting in network manager and what became Net-SNMP, and why it became popular. The TL;DR? It’s about empowering your users with simplicity. Note: this document is entirely from the perspective of an operator – not from the prospective of a network management tool vendor.

Jaime Jiménez, Ericsson, ER; Scott Mansfield, Ericsson, BNEW TS ST; Raquel Rodriguez, Ericsson, ETAC; Mikko Pesonen, Ericsson, ETAC; Vesa Torvinen, Ericsson, ETAC; Janne Karvonen, Ericsson, ETAC

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the evolving challenges and solutions in network management, focusing on scalability, telemetry, security and possible future techno- logical additions. It uses the Ericsson Transport Automation Controller (ETAC) as a typical deployment of an SDN con- troller and Transport Automation system. The paper high- lights the complexities of legacy systems and the need for standardized models and efficient data streaming. It also explores the transition towards zero-trust architectures. Lastly, we examine potential additions to the network management domain, specifically the integration of generative AI and agentic architectures that adhere to autonomic networking principles, as well as the possibilities of retrofitting modern constrained protocols in the networking domain.

Thomas Graf, Swisscom; Holger Keller, DT; Dan Voyer, Bell Canada; Paolo Lucente, NTT; Diego Lopez & Ignacio Dominguez Martinez-Casanueva, Telefonica Brad Peters, NBN; Paolo Fasano, Telecom Italia; Pang Ran, China Unicom; Weiqiang Cheng, China Mobile; Benoit Claise, Michael Mackey, Huawei

Network operations face a series of challenges:
- Data Overload from Network Operations
- Difficulties in Data Analysis and Insight Extraction
- Complex Data Correlation Requirements
- Service and Customer Correlation
- Data Storage and Format Disparities
- Contextual Understanding and Relationship Mapping - Loss of Context in Data Collection
- Data Collection Methods and Interpretation
- Organizational Silos
- Multiple Sources of Truths
- Machine Readable Knowledge

The advent of model-driven protocols like NETCONF or RESTCONF, along with the YANG data modeling language, marked a breakthrough in the network management and operations area. These technologies have brought several advances both in configuring and monitoring the network, the two requirements for enabling a closed loop that can deliver the promised autonomous networks.

Manoj Gudi, Alexander Pelov, Laurent Toutain, Jean-Marie Bonnin

This paper proposes an evolved network management architecture that integrates CORECONF alongside existing NETCONF deployments to optimize telemetry operations, particularly in constrained and resource-limited environments. Adoption of CORECONF can be done progressively in stages by using plugins or middlewares as shown in these architectures. By leveraging the efficiency of CORECONF with Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) encoding and Schema Item Identifiers (SIDs), the architecture enhances performance, scalability, and sustainability in network operations. This integration is especially beneficial for applications such as energy-efficient net- working, IoT deployments, high-density telemetry scenarios, and unique use cases involving secondary connectivity technologies and asymmetrical connectivity.

Carsten Bormann, Universität Bremen TZI

This short paper provides an overview over the CORECONF architecture for employing YANG models in managing IoT devices. CORECONF is based on CoAP as a transfer protocol and YANG- CBOR as its data representation format, analogous to the way the original RESTCONF was defined to use HTTP and YANG-XML or YANG-JSON, and the way NETCONF uses SSH and YANG-XML.

Jürgen Schönwälder, Constructor University

Looking back at the Network Management Workshop more than 20 years ago, it is revealing how much the recommendations were shaped by substantial discussions in the protocol developer and network operator communities at that time. Although some hot discussion topics from that time have since become largely irrelevant, certain technology choices suggested back then still have an impact on our network management technology and standards today (albeit not always in the most optimal manner).

Roland Bless, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

The complexity of today’s networks is steadily increasing and so is the network management and control. The current efforts to achieve controllability by employing AI-based mechanisms and Network Digital Twins on top add even more complexity. This position paper argues to master the increasing complexity by simplification at the base: the introduction of the zero-touch control plane connectivity solution Kira that serves as an invariant for network management operations. Its provided connectivity can be used as base for all management and control tasks allowing to re- cover from the most complex failure scenarios. Kira’s tightly integrated add-on services provide a perfect ba- sis for autonomic network management solutions.