A Resource Efficient Implementation of the RESTCONF Protocol for OpenWrt Systems

Abstract: In recent years, the open source operating system OpenWrt has become a popular option for replacing proprietary firmware on networking devices such as home routers or access points. In order to configure an OpenWrt system, like setting up firewall rules, the user has to either sign in to the web interface or use SSH to manually change configuration files on the device. While the current approach is sufficient for small home networks, it only allows for limited automation of management tasks and configuration management becomes time-consuming, for example, on larger campus networks where access control lists on OpenWrt access points need updates regularly. This paper describes our efforts to implement the RESTCONF configuration management protocol standardized by the IETF on OpenWrt systems that have limited CPU and memory resources. We detail our design choices that make our implementation resource efficient for the use cases we target and we compare our implementation against other similar solutions. Our implementation is available on GitHub under an open source license.