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Purple text is new..! Put 4D and RCP before NETCONF.

Replace old BISMark paragraph with new one that I have written at the end.
A clean slate called 4D was proposed in 2004 which explicitly stressed on separation of control plane from forwarding elements of network. New architecture proposed four constituent elements of network decision, dissemination, discovery and data thereby called 4D architecture. [5] Routing Control Platform (RCP) was an effort towards improvement of routing process improvement in 2005. It aimed to provide authenticity like iBGP and scalability features like route reflectors. It uses IGP to analyze all available routes in an autonomous system and chooses BGP routes on part of routers. RCP allows more flexibility because it can send different BGP routes to each router which is helpful in full mesh configurations. [6]

NETCONF
Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF), is a network management protocol. It was developed in the NETCONF working group of IETF and published in RFC 4741 (2006) and later revised version was published in RFC 6241 (2011). NETCONF facilitates to set, modify and remove the configuration of network devices. Its working is monitored on top of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) layer. The NETCONF protocol uses a document-oriented approach based on XML. Network devices are required to expose a programming interface using which configuration messages can be communicated. Noticeable thing is that NETCONF does not offer programmability of network though configuration is simplified. Control plane and data plane still remain mixed. Nevertheless, NETCONF is a useful tool for network management and works fine on hybrid and general purpose commodity hardware. There can be specific states referring to particular configurations of the network.

NETCONF provides rich functionalities and more advanced features than traditional SNMP methods. Open source implementations and demonstrations of NETCONF show the NETCONF is potentially more efficient and secure. Also it provides rich

functionalities and more advanced features than traditional SNMP methods. EnSuite (Yencap) is a good example. [3] Various RFCs describe potential capabilities of NETCONF but standard does not impose their implementation. [Give references of RFCs = 4741, 5277, 6022]

Yang YANG is a famous data modeling language for the NETCONF protocol. The YANG data modeling language was developed by the NETMOD working group in the IETF and was published as RFC 6020 in October 2010. The data modeling language can be used to model both configuration data as well as state data of network elements. Furthermore, YANG can be used to define the format of event notifications emitted by network elements and it allows data modelers to define the signature of remote procedure calls that can be invoked on network elements via the NETCONF protocol. YANG represents data structures in an XML tree format. It has a number of built-in data types. One can build new data types by simply using built-in data types. This is because we may require some application specific data types. Additional application specific data types can be derived from the built-in data types. More complex reusable data structures can be represented as groupings. YANG data models can use XPATH expressions to define constraints on the elements of a YANG data model.

Procera [4][5]
Procera is a network control platform to implement event-driven network rules to handle various types of situations. Procera provides a high-level functional programming language to link higher layer event-driven network policy and lower layer network configuration thereby simplifying the policy implementation. Procera offers different control domains using which network administrator can define certain limitations and forwarding rules as per the event. Additional control domains can help network administrators have more flexibility in their network policies. Also multiple control domains can jointly be used to define richer rules. Currently Procera supports 4 control domains as given in table. This is just the beginning of an idea, more control domains will be introduced along Proceras development.
Control domains Time Data Examples

Status Flow

Peak load time, time of year Data usage by a machine, Data rate Authentication status Ingress port, ether src/dst, vlan priority, IP src/dst, port number src/dst

Concept model is shown in following figure.

Event sources are the network devices that send the event information to the Procera policy engine. Policy engine analyzes the events and looks for appropriate rule description in policy language and finally network policy is refreshed. After which, refreshed network policy is communicated with network controller which translates it into actual forwarding rules. Network controller is connected to devices through OpenFlow protocol. BISMark is an example implementation of Procera in home network for network visibility purpose. Traditional networking supports very limited visibility e.g. status of a device. Also we dont usually have real time performance report. ISPs require more visibility of their networks. uCap is monitoring tool is implemented on top of the BISMark framework. uCap gathers and transmits data consumption information of individual nodes to the specified database or monitoring point. Users can set up limits for particular nodes/machines to consume limited data over a defined time span. After which connectivity is automatically blocked by uCAP.

References:
1234A Survey of Software-Defined Networking: Past, Present and Future of Programmable Networks Design and Implementation of NETCONF-Based Network Management System An Empirical Study of the NETCONF Protocol A. Voellmy, H. Kim, and N. Feamster, Procera: A Language for High-Level Reactive Network Control, Proc.1st Wksp. Hot Topics in Software Defined Networks. 5- Improving Network Management with Software Defined Networking 6- Design and Implementation of a Routing Control Platform

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