11/03/09

Tina TSOU (tena@huawei.com)

Network configuration in IP networkDraft-tsou-network-configuration-problem-statement-

01.txt

11/03/09

Introduction

• With the network evolution to all IP, IP network will have more and more network devices.

• Constructing an IP network will take a lot of effort due to the large number of network devices being configured manually.

11/03/09

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.

• The workload of network configuration in this typical scenario is estimated and shown in the following figure:

+-----------+----------+------------+--------+----------+---------+ |Project |Config. |Travel 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 |

+-----------+----------+------------+--------+----------+---------+

• Engineer travel time to the network devices occupies 51% and configuration design of the device occupies 33% of the total effort.

11/03/09

Configuration workload in IP network

• Besides LTE IP backhaul network, DSLAM or FTTx have 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 providers to deploy and maintain such large scale IP networks.

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Problems need to be solved for IP 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 and get specific configuration information from NMS.

• IP configuration problems to be solved to achieve Plug & Play in the commissioning device stage:

– Initial configuration of management IP for network device management.– 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? – How can network devices authenticate each other during the automatic connection setup

process?– Interoperate among different heterogeneous equipments (such as network composed of

routers, switches, access gateways etc) – Traversing equipments from different vendors may cause the problem that the third party

network may block the Plug & Play of network devices.– 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.