A Method to Automatically Extract a Network Device Configuration Model by Parsing Network Device Configurations

Abstract

When network engineers design a network, they need to verify the validity of their design in a test environment. Since testing on actual equipment is expensive and burdensome for engineers, we have proposed automatic verification methods using simulators and consistency verification methods for a network configuration model. Combining these methods with conventional verification methods for network device configurations will increase the number of verification options that do not require actual devices. However, the burden of writing existing networks into models has been a problem in our model-based verification. In this paper, we propose a method for automatically extracting a network device configuration model by parsing the contents obtained from network devices via show running-config commands and the like. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in realizing round-trip engineering between network device configurations and the network device configuration model, we extracted a model from existing network device configurations and generated device configuration commands. As a result, we obtained model and commands with high accuracy, indicating that the proposed method is effective.