Data modeling for NETCONF-based network management: XML schema or YANG

These days, the NETCONF protocol has evolved as an XML-based standardization to meet the ever-pressing configuration management demands. And with the emergence of NETCONF, it is expected that a separate effort to study data modeling in the interest of network management should be undertaken. XML Schema and YANG have become two main candidate data modeling languages for NETCONF-based network management. This paper first analyzes the requirements for a configuration data modeling language, and tries to evaluate these two languages from the perspective of agreed requirements with the support of our formerly proposed framework. Based on this comparison, we argue that, the focus on immediate requirements for the NETCONF protocol has made YANG much more appropriate than XML Schema for NETCONF-based data modeling, and further improvements call for XML Schema from the NETCONF point of view and YANG from the viewpoint of protocol independence.