Subscription to Notifications in a Distributed Architecture

The mechanism to support a subscription of a continuous and customized stream of updates from a YANG datastore is defined in and . Requirements for Subscription to YANG Datastores are defined in . By streaming YANG-Push notifications from publishers to receivers, much better performance and fine-grained sampling can be achieved than with a polling-based mechanism. In a distributed forwarding system on a network node, the packet forwarding is delegated to multiple processors on line cards. In order not to overwhelm the route processor resources, it is not uncommon that data records are published directly from processors on line cards to target receivers to further increase efficiency on the routing system. This document complements the general subscription requirements defined in by adding the paragraph: A Subscription Service MAY support the ability to export from multiple software processes on a single routing system and expose the information which software process produced which message.

The following terms are defined in and are not redefined here: Subscriber Publisher Receiver Subscription The following term is used with "ietf-notification-capabilities" in and are not redefined here: Notification Capabilities In addition, this document defines the below terms. Some of these terms are distinguished between Network Node versus Component and Parent versus Agent to distinguish their role within the distributed system. Network Node and Component are used to distinguish whether the system component is reachable outside the distributed system or not. Parent and Agent is used to distinguish whether it manages or is being managed within the distributed system. Component: Refers to a network device component, such as a processor on a line card within a distributed routing system. Network Node Subscription: The Subscription requested by the Subscriber as described in . It may be decomposed into multiple Component Subscriptions. Component Subscription: The Subscription that defines a data source which is managed and controlled by a single Publisher. Network Node Notification Capabilities: The overall notification capabilities that the group of Publishers can expose to the Subscriber as defined in for the distributed system. This includes which YANG nodes can be subscribed at which minimum-update-period for periodical subscriptions respectively which minimum-dampening-period for on-change subscriptions. Component Notification Capabilities: The notification capabilities that each Publisher exposes to the Publisher Parent. This includes which YANG nodes with which minimum-update-period for periodical subscriptions respectively which minimum-dampening-period for on-change subscriptions can be subscribed on which Component. Publisher Parent: The Component of a Publisher that interacts with the Subscriber to deal with the Network Node Subscription. It decomposes the Network Node Subscription to multiple Component Subscriptions and interacts with the Publisher Agents. Publisher Agent: The Publisher Parent subordinate Component that deals with the Component Subscription and publishing the data to the Receiver. Network Node: Is the network node of a distributed system which contains one or more Publishers that obtains the data from the YANG datastore and pushes it to the Receiver. Message Publisher: The Publisher that pushes the message to the Receiver. Message Publisher ID: A 32-bit identifier of the publishing process that is locally unique to the Network Node. The Publisher Parent ensures uniqueness by assigning the identifier to the Publisher Agent. With this identifier the publishing process from where the message was published from can be uniquely identified by Receivers. Receivers SHOULD use the transport session and the Publisher ID field to separate different publisher streams originating from the same Network Node. The Message Publisher ID identifier remains unchanged throughout the subscription lifecycle.

In a distributed forwarding system of a Network Node much YANG data is subscribed to many Components, processors on line cards, but published from a single route processor instead. This creates an unnecessary overhead at the route processor and a potential bottleneck. Publishing the YANG data directly from the Components avoids this inefficiency. This document proposes a specification that subscribed YANG data can be published from Components for configured subscriptions. The route processor is only involved in maintaining and decomposing the Subscription, which includes notifying the Receiver which Subscription is being published from which Component with subscription state change notifications. To enable Receivers to map notification messages to a particular Publisher Agent, the Message Publisher ID in the transport message header of the YANG notification message is introduced. In case of UDP transport, this is described in . Further, introduces YANG "push-update" and "push-change-update" notification Message Publisher ID augments which with unique sequence-numbers per publishing process described in , each message can now uniquely be identified, loss recognized and related to a Publisher Agent.

below shows the distributed data export framework.

A collector usually includes two components, the Subscriber generates the subscription instructions to express what and how the Receiver wants to receive the data; the Receiver is the target for the data publication. For one subscription, there can be one or more Receivers. And the Subscriber does not necessarily share the same IP address as the Receivers. In this framework, the Publisher pushes messages to the Receiver according to the subscription. The Publisher is either in the Parent or Agent role. The Publisher Parent knows all the capabilities that its Agents can provide and exposes the Network Node Notification Capabilities to the collector. The Subscriber maintains the Network Node Subscription at the Publisher Parent and the Publisher Parent disassembles the Network Node Subscription to multiple Component Subscriptions, depending upon which source data is needed. The Component Subscriptions are then distributed to the corresponding Publisher Agents on route processors and processors on line cards. Publisher Agents collect metrics according to the Component Subscription, add its metadata, encapsulates, and pushes messages. Publisher Parent and Publisher Agents interact with each other in several ways: Publisher Agents need to register with the Parent when the process starts or restarts. Contracts are created and maintained throughout the subscription lifecycle between the Publisher Parent and each Agent and on its Component Notification Capabilities, and the format for notification data structure. The Publisher Parent relays the component subscriptions to the Publisher Agents. The Publisher Agents announce the status of their Component Subscriptions to the Publisher Parent. The status of the overall subscription is maintained by the Publisher Parent. The Publisher Parent is responsible for notifying the subscriber in case of problems with the Component Subscriptions. The technical mechanisms or protocols used for the coordination of operational information between Publisher Parent and Agent is out of scope of this document.

The Collector can send subscription requests only to the Parent. This requires the Publisher Parent to: expose the Network Node Notification Capabilities that can be served by multiple Publisher Agents; disassemble the Network Node Subscription to multiple Component Subscriptions, and distribute them to the Publisher Agents of the corresponding metric sources from the YANG schema tree so that they do not overlap; how the subscription is being distributed is implementation specific and not part of this document. notify changes related to the existing subscriptions to the different Publisher Agents. And the Publisher Agent to: Inherit the Network Node Subscription properties from Publisher Parent for its Component Subscription; share the same life-cycle as the Network Node Subscription; share the same Subscription ID as the Network Node Subscription.

The Publisher Agent collects data and encapsulates the packets per Component Subscription. The format and structure of the data records are defined by the YANG schema, so that the decomposition at the Receiver can benefit from the structured and hierarchical data records. The Receiver associates the YANG data records with Subscription ID to the subscribed subscription and with the Message Publisher ID to the corresponding publisher process. When a Network Node Subscription is decomposed, the "subscription-started" and "subscription-modified" notifications defined in MUST include the list of Message Publisher IDs of the Publishers serving that subscription, and each "push-update" and "push-change-update" notification defined in MUST include the Message Publisher ID of the Publisher that sends it.

All subscription state change notifications MUST be sent to the Receivers by the Publisher Parent. Changes in the subscription decomposition resulting in a new list of Publisher Agents are advertised with "subscription-modified" notifications. A Publisher Agent does not send records for a subscription before the Publisher Parent has sent the "subscription-started" or "subscription-modified" notification that lists its Message Publisher ID.

This document assumes that all Publisher Agents are preconfigured to push data. Publisher Agents that send data are selected based on the subscription decomposition result. From the Receivers perspective, all Publisher Agents can share the same or have each a different source IP address for data export. How connectivity is established within the distributed system architecture is out of scope of this document. For connectionless data transport such as UDP based transport the same Layer 4 source port number for data export can be used. For connection based data transport such as HTTPS based transport, each Publisher Agent MUST be able to receive packet retrieval acknowledgements from Receivers, and therefore requires a dedicated, dynamically assigned Layer 4 source port per software process. The specific configuration on transports is described in the respective documents.

This YANG module imports definitions from and . WG List: Authors: Tianran Zhou Guangying Zheng Eric Voit Thomas Graf Pierre Francois "; description "Defines augmentation for ietf-subscribed-notifications to enable the distributed publication with single subscription. Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as authors of the code. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, is permitted pursuant to, and subject to the license terms contained in, the Revised BSD License set forth in Section 4.c of the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info). All revisions of IETF and IANA published modules can be found at the YANG Parameters registry (https://www.iana.org/assignments/yang-parameters). This version of this YANG module is part of RFC XXXX; see the RFC itself for full legal notices."; revision 2026-10-04 { description "Initial version"; reference "RFC XXXX: Subscription to Notifications in a Distributed Architecture"; } grouping message-publisher-id { description "Provides a reusable message-publisher-id leaf."; leaf message-publisher-id { type uint32; config false; description "Identifies the Component software process which publishes notification messages (e.g., processor 1 on line card 1). This field is used to notify the receiver which publisher process published which message. The identifier is locally unique to the Network Node."; } } grouping message-publisher-ids { description "Provides a reusable message-publisher-id-list leaf-list."; leaf-list message-publisher-id { type uint32; config false; description "Identifies the Component software process which publishes notification messages (e.g., processor 1 on line card 1). This field is used to notify the receiver which publisher processes are going to publish. The identifiers are locally unique to the Network Node."; } } augment "/sn:subscriptions/sn:subscription" { description "This augmentation allows the Message Publisher ID to be exposed for a subscription."; uses message-publisher-ids; } augment "/sn:subscription-started" { description "This augmentation adds the Message Publisher ID to the subscription-started subscription change notifications."; uses message-publisher-ids; } augment "/sn:subscription-modified" { description "This augmentation adds the Message Publisher ID to the subscription-modified subscription change notifications."; uses message-publisher-ids; } augment "/yp:push-update" { description "This augmentation adds the Message Publisher ID in the push-update notification."; uses message-publisher-id; } augment "/yp:push-change-update" { description "This augmentation adds the Message Publisher ID in the push-change-update notification."; uses message-publisher-id; } } ]]>

This document registers the following namespace URI in the "IETF XML Registry" registry group : URI: urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:yang:ietf-distributed-notif Maintained by IANA? N Registrant Contact: The IESG. XML: N/A; the requested URI is an XML namespace. This document registers the following YANG module in the "YANG Module Names" registry within the "YANG Parameters" registry group: Name: ietf-distributed-notif Maintained by IANA? N Namespace: urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:yang:ietf-distributed-notif Prefix: dn Reference: RFC XXXX

Note to the RFC-Editor: Please remove this section before publishing.

Huawei implemented the Subscription Decomposition described in this document for a YANG-Push publisher on UDP-based Transport for Configured Subscriptions in their VRP platform.

6WIND implemented the Subscription Decomposition described in this document for a YANG-Push publisher on UDP-based Transport for Configured Subscriptions in their VSR platform.

This document enables that subscriptions can be distributed among multiple Component subscriptions. The ietf-distributed-notif YANG Module extends the Subscription state change, push-update and push-change-update notifications. In Subscription state change notifications it describes from which Message Publisher IDs notifications are going to be published from. In push-update and push-change-update notifications it describes from which Message Publisher ID the notification was published from. Both are important for operations to monitor at the YANG-Push Receiver whether all Components are publishing notifications and thanks to unique sequence-numbers per publishing process and timestamp per message delay and loss per message and publishing process can be calculated. If used with UDP-based Transport for Configured Subscriptions, applicability applies with distributed multiple Component subscriptions as well.

This section uses the template described in . The 'ietf-distributed-notif' YANG module defines a data model that is designed to be accessed via YANG-based management protocols, such as NETCONF and RESTCONF . These YANG-based management protocols (1) have to use a secure transport layer (e.g., SSH , TLS , and QUIC ) and (2) have to use mutual authentication. The Network Configuration Access Control Model (NACM) provides the means to restrict access for particular NETCONF or RESTCONF users to a preconfigured subset of all available NETCONF or RESTCONF protocol operations and content. There are no data nodes defined in this YANG module that are writable/creatable/deletable (i.e., "config true", which is the default). Some of the readable data nodes in this YANG module may be considered sensitive or vulnerable in some network environments. It is thus important to control read access (e.g., via get, get-config, or Notification) to these data nodes. Specifically, the following subtrees and data nodes have particular sensitivities/vulnerabilities:

/sn:subscriptions/sn:subscription/dn:message-publisher-id
/sn:subscription-started/dn:message-publisher-id
/sn:subscription-modified/dn:message-publisher-id
/yp:push-update/dn:message-publisher-id
/yp:push-change-update/dn:message-publisher-id

The entries in the list above will show the identity of the originating Publisher process. Exposure of this information may assist an attacker in mapping the distributed system or in injecting spoofed Notifications. Operators MUST ensure that access to sensitive data is restricted and that Notifications are sent over secure and authenticated channels. Security Considerations defined in do also apply for this document. Since this document enables the capability to publish from network processors to YANG-Push receivers without the involvement of a route processor, it has several security implications. Since network processors as Publisher Agents are exposed directly to YANG-Push receivers, security can't be enforced centrally at the route processor anymore. Therefore between YANG-Push Publisher and Receiver, multiple trust, authentication and authorization, with multiple entities for each Parent and Agent established secure transport layer, needs to be managed.

We thank Kent Watsen, Mahesh Jethanandani, Martin Bjorklund, Tim Carey, Qin Wu, Robert Wilton, Benoit Claise, Alex Huang Feng, Camilo Cardona, Juergen Schoenwaelder, Joel Halpern, Yingzhen Qu, Daniel Migault, Paul Aitken, Deb Cooley, Mike Bishop, Mohamed Boucadair and Ketan Talaulikar for their constructive suggestions for improving this document.

This appendix is non-normative. shows a typical configured subscription to the Network Node with distributed data export capability. Subscription request has been removed for brevity.

Before starting to push data, the "subscription-started" subscription state notification is sent to the Receiver. The following example assumes the NETCONF transport has already established. The notification indicates that the configured subscription is decomposed into two component subscriptions by carrying two message Message Publisher IDs: #1 and #2.

2007-09-01T10:00:00Z 39 ds:operational

/ex:foo

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]]> Then, both Publishers send notifications with the corresponding data record to the Receiver.