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 Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html This Internet-Draft will expire on May 30,2010. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 0000 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents in effect on the date of publication of this document (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info). Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Abstract Tsou Expires May 30, 2010 [Page 1] 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. Tsou Expires May 30, 2010 [Page 2] Internet-Draft network configuration problem statement November 2009 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. Tsou Expires May 30, 2010 [Page 3] Internet-Draft network configuration problem statement November 2009 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. Tsou Expires May 30, 2010 [Page 4] Internet-Draft network configuration problem statement November 2009 +-----------+----------+------------+--------+----------+---------+ |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. Tsou Expires May 30, 2010 [Page 5] Internet-Draft network configuration problem statement November 2009 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. Tsou Expires May 30, 2010 [Page 6] Internet-Draft network configuration problem statement November 2009 5. IANA Considerations None. 6. References None. 7. Acknowledgments Data on network configuration workload of LTE scenario was estimated by Weihua, CHI. Tsou Expires May 30, 2010 [Page 7] Internet-Draft network configuration problem statement November 2009 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 Tsou Expires May 30, 2010 [Page 8]