NETCONF agent for link state monitoring

Fault detection mechanisms have a major importance for network managers, allowing them to respond to system failures by resolving or mitigating their effects. Network and system management technologies should include fault detection mechanisms. NETCONF is a new technology that includes monitoring capabilities and defines a fault-detection mechanism based on sending notifications. This paper documents the development of a NETCONF agent for link-state monitoring and analyzes/evaluates the most important features and capabilities of this management protocol. Additionally, it also analyzes the encoding of the monitoring messages that is performed by NETCONF and evaluates the amount of overhead introduced by the gSOAP API.