Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

2020 08 05

Recording:  TOC-weekly-20200805.mp4

Agenda

1. Call for Scribe (minutes owner): Lusheng Ji (AT&T)

2. Roll Call & Quorum Check 

   Company	Contact Name	Attendance	Alternate Contact	Attendance
   AT&T	Jack Murray Co-Chair	Y	Lusheng Ji
   China Mobile	Jinri Huang Co-Chair	Y	Weichen Ni
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl	Y	Ondřej Hudousek
   Ericsson	John-Paul Lane		John Keeney	Y
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda	Y	Anil Umesh
   Nokia	Juha Oravainen	Y	Thoralf Czichy
   Orange	William Diego	Y	Vincent Danno
   Radisys	Ganesh Shenbagaraman	Y	Sachin Srivastava
   Verizon	Viswa Kumar		Kristen Young

   *Quorum: 50% or more of total TOC voting members unless excluded due to attendance.  We have a quorum and can vote on activities.

3. Review and Agree to Minutes of Previous Meeting 

   1. Moved by Jack, seconded by John (Keeney), no objection, minutes approved.

4. Review of Today's Agenda

   1. No new agenda item requested.

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. Maintenance release status: NonRTRIC updated to 2.0.1; INT added demo scripts; unmet objectives moved to Cherry;
   2. Q: William: status of O-CU.  Jack: source code only for now; testing/build will be in Cherry.
   3. Q: Jinri: summary of changes.  Lusheng: Not yet; will provide.
   4. Q: Juha: license scan?  Lusheng: Not yet; will do.
   5. Jack: table vote till next week, pending the action items raised by Q's.
6. Copyright updates
   1. Board info received from Zbynek.  Not reached full conclusions yet.  Have some resolutions, for example EC can grant Copy Right approvals regarding ASN/1 messages, APIs, for OSC to develop.  But still some minor issues remaining to be clarified before this is fully concluded and communicated to OSC.
   2. John Keeney: for code developed before CR grant, how to handle copy right owner request (e.g. reassignment), or treat the 60 day cool off period as dev dead zone?
      1. Jack: our permission for dev from O-RAN Alliance is at the end of 60 day cool-off for the copyrighted materials.  Clarification will need to bring to the legal team response beyond this point.  Need emails from John and Thoralf for framing the specific questions to legal.

7. Marketing of the current release (WG, LF, PR)

   1. Jinri: not marketing, but some "O-RAN Alliance related issues". 
      1. Mirror sites for Asia and Europe: O-RAN board requested OSC to investigate.
      2. EC asks us to provide a list of O-RAN related components being dev in ONAP and by whom; Jinri will send email to reflector for details of the request;
      3. Network slicing from WG1.  EC asks us to provide list of O-RAN network slicing elements being developed by various open source projects (e.g. ONAP).
   2. John Keeney volunteering for providing info from SMO Non RT RIC perspective;  Trishan and William offering help for investigating ONAP side.
   3. Tracy: interested in other open source projects than ONAP?  Jinri: Yes

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. No open action items from before.  Going forward will add these 2 items: reflectors and inter-relationship with other open source projects.

9. Standing Agenda Items (Brief Status of Ongoing Activities)

   1. Release Manager Trishan de Lanerolle /Release Planning: Weekly TOC Scheduling

      1. Bronze Maintenance Release
      2. CherryTimeline

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

      1. Skipped due to Rittwik not able to make it to today's meeting.

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

      1. Dev sprint demos will start from Dev Sprint 2 (for achievements from Dev Sprint 1)

   4. Report out from PTL: Stand-Up & Report Out on Blockers 

      1. John Keeney Non-RealTime RIC (RAN Intelligent Controller) (NONRTRIC)

         1. Maintenance release enhancements: bug fixes, cert management;
         2. For Cherry:Latest of A1 (pending instructions on what to do with the 60-day cool off); SMO scope alignment; Upstream A1 to ONAP
            1. Jinri: EC meeting is next week for getting clarification on the 60-day cool-off.  Need specifics on what questions to clarify.

      2. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 

         1. Skipped due to Matti not able to make it to today's meeting.

      3. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC)

         1. Near RT RIC has a demo next week.
         2. E2AP spec update from Alliance.  Configuration transfer; fail-over and scalability, we will see if we can fit in Cherry (discussion with Rittwik).
            1. Jack: make sure what's planned captured in NearRT RIC Platform project Cherry summary table.
         3. Welcoming Samsung and HCL participating in NearRT RIC Platform.
         4. Bronze release back log issues in E2 term/E2 mgr, sub mgr: work in progress. 1 under review (hopefully demo next week). RIC-444, RIC-628 in Dev Sprint 2.

      4. user-a934b O-RAN Centralized Unit (OCU) 

         1. Jack: many interests in O-CU.  Can Yingying provide a 10~15 min talk on O-CU plan for Cherry next week or the week after?  Jinri: okay.

      5. Sachin Srivastava O-RAN Distributed Unit High (ODUHIGH)

         1. Sphoorthi:
            1. ODUHIGH tried to integration effort with ODULOW during maintenance release, aligned with Intel's FAPI file.
               
               1. Code in master branch now, do we need to move to bronze branch?  Lusheng: not have to because this does not impact the (reduced) maintenance release objectives.
            2. FAPI file from Intel not fully aligned with spec.  O-DU HIGH implementation aligned with Intel file.
               1. Jack: A gap that needs to raise be raised in documentation, make sure Intel follow through, put in a JIRA ticket to track.
            3. Cherry features: UE attachment. O1 interface (minimum health-check)
         2. Ganesh: Welcoming HCL to O-DU HIGH participation.

      6. Zhimin Yuan O-RAN Distributed Unit Low (ODULOW)

      7. Martin Skorupski Operations and Maintenance (OAM)

      8. Alex Stancu Simulations (SIM)

      9. Xiaohua Zhang Infrastructure (INF)

      10. weichen ni Documentation (DOC)

      11. (TBD) O-RAN Radio Unit (ORU)

   5. Jack: reminding PTLs on keeping Cherry deliverable summary tables up to date.  Will continue on remaining projects.  Call on SMO project PTL and contributors, will discuss more next week.
      

10. New Agenda Items (New Business): New Items Submitted (+speaker) & Open Call to TOC For Additional Items. 

11. Planning for Next Meeting

12. Any Other Business (AOB) 

13. Meeting Summary (resolutions, new action items, etc.

2020 07 29

Recording: GMT20200729-120223_Zoom2-O-RA_1920x1020.mp4

Agenda

1. Call for Scribe (minutes owner) Farheen Cefalu

2. Roll Call & Quorum Check 

   Company	Contact Name	Attendance	Alternate Contact	Attendance
   AT&T	Jack Murray Co-Chair	x	Lusheng Ji
   China Mobile	Jinri Huang Co-Chair	x	Weichen Ni
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl		Ondřej Hudousek
   Ericsson	John-Paul Lane	x	John Keeney
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda	x	Anil Umesh
   Nokia	Juha Oravainen	x	Thoralf Czichy
   Orange	William Diego	x	Vincent Danno
   Radisys	Ganesh Shenbagaraman		Sachin Srivastava
   Verizon	Viswa Kumar		Kristen Young

   *Quorum: 50% or more of total TSC voting members unless excluded due to attendance.  We have a quorum and can vote on activities.

3. Review and Agree to Minutes of Previous Meeting 

   1. Vote to approve minutes for 22 Jul 2020 

   2. On motion made by Jinri Huang
   3. Seconded by Juha Oravainen
   4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed

4. Review of Today's Agenda

   1. We will continue about the SMO and the voting.
   2. Review the maintenance release and schedule.
   3. Discuss Minute taking and scribe.  We have to rotate among the TOC members.
   4. Discussion on Cherry

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. SMO Vote: Jack: Last week a few people dropped early.  We got 4 in favor 1 abstaining 1 against.  We need to get to 5 votes across TOC even though we had majority present I want to make sure the TOC takes time to work through it and get approval.  We have a standing motion on creating an SMO project brought by Rittwik on the RSAC committee.  Are there further clarifications.
      1. AT&T, Ericsson, NTT DOCOMO, and Nokia voted in favor.  Jinri abstained.
      2. Jinri: I would like to change my vote to Yes.
      3. William from Orange votes in favor.
         1. Vote to add the SMO project to O-RAN SC.
         2. On motion made by user-59b16
         3. Seconded by John-Paul Lane
         4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
      4. Jack: We need to add the SMO to wiki and create a repo in gerrit. Action/ user-59b16 add the SMO project to the wiki and gerrit.  
      5. Jack: We will need a PTL.  Looking for people to take on a role as a PTL for the new SMO project.  We should be following Best Practices.  As an interested party anyone can contribute to the project.  Requires an LF ID.  We prefer you use your company's email.  If you want to take a more active role you can offer to be a committer.  There are a small number of committers per project, minimum 2, maximum 5.  The PTL can also be a committer.
      6. You also have to sign the CLA agreement for licensing.  There are two different licenses
         1. Apache license
         2. O-RAN license
         3. For SMO we expect contributions under the Apache license.  We are not under the 3GPP interfaces.  One of the questions asked by EC.  For RIC Near RT controller we have separate applications.  We are going to try to capture these applications as SMO applications and continue to see if that works or we need to separate.  R-Apps under the SMO projects.  We will create a structure that clearly identifies the people.
      7. Action/ user-59b16 start the Principles we will kick the wiki off with these principles.  The RSAC has proposed minimum viable product.  Looking at O-RAN Alliance working groups specifications.  If we don't find specs there then we try to work with them towards the specification so we are not creating throw away code.
   2. Lusheng: Email voting request was sent to the ML on July 9th.  The vote if for 3 procedures and best practices. 
      1. All gerrit code submissions to include at least 1 Jira issue.  This is for tracking purposes.  This creates a Link between gerrit submissions and Jira issues.  
         1. We currently have 3 votes.  Who wants to vote in favor?
         2. Jinri: I thought I already cast my vote via email.  I vote yes.
         3. Jack: I vote yes.
         4. That brings us to 5 votes. 
         5. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
         6. Lusheng get clarification from LF how to list multiple issue IDs to gerrit. 
         7. Will this be a gerrit pre-check?
         8. Yes, the system will return with a warning message.
      2. License scans are not done until one or two weeks prior to a release.  We require more time.  LF does not scan SCP repos.  That leaves those repos open. LF does have a tool called nexus iq.  People have been using that to do license scans.  Because of the language the security vulnerability may not be helpful for Java but for Go C++ is not as helpful.  Requesting all the repos to add this nexus iq job.  Action item for repo owners is to define a job.  There are samples available for you to follow.Any questions?
         1. On motion made by Lusheng to include a license scan to all repos.
         2. Seconded by Jinri Huang 
         3. Vote taken item passed
      3. Adopting semantic versioning for the artifacts (libraries and docker images and use it for the artifacts).  The action item is for the developers and contributors in the future please use major, minor, and patch versioning.  We can write some best practices in the future but this is the format.  Another action item is what will be the best way to verify a version.
         1. On motion made by Lusheng to include a semantic versioning process to all repos.
         2. Seconded by Jinri Huang .
         3. Vote taken item passed
6. Copyright updates
   1. No updates on copyrights
   2. Jinri: Zbynek sent an official copyright notification to us. 
   3. Jack: We have an action item that we have to make a proposal to the EC with Stefan but that is still in process.
   4. John-Paul: Is this the 60 day impacts?
   5. Jack: No we were talking about the copyright permission from O-RAN Alliance on any copyrighted material.  The 60 day gets approved by us and we're refining the language for that feature.  That is an alliance issue when the material can be managed copyright material.
   6. John-Paul: Is that resolved?
   7. Jack: Has the 60 day copyright IPR issues resolved?
   8. Action/ Jinri Huang  will check with Zbynek of whether this will imapact. 

7. Marketing of the current release (WG, LF, PR)

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

9. Standing Agenda Items (Brief Status of Ongoing Activities)

   1. Release Manager Trishan de Lanerolle /Release Planning: Weekly TOC Scheduling

      1. Bronze Maintenance Release
         1. August 1st is the close out date.  I will look to Lusheng to give us a report but I think the progress is less than hoped for in a few areas. 
         2. Lusheng: Status: we have a couple deliverables planned. 
            1. O-DU Low running in the OSC integration lab and completing the O-DU high.  This is lagging behind.  We've been having system related issues. We had 2 dell servers.  For some reason the NIC and FPGA cards do not work right on these two servers.  Later we got the wolf pass servers.  We're having problems installing OS on this server.  It will not make it to this weekend.
         3. KPI-MON xApp flow the near real time xApp team have been trying to build the docker image with other xApps to complete this flow.  There were some problems with the routing. 
            1. Matti: The subscription manager is rejecting the request.  I reached out to the team but have not gotten the response.  The internal communication is working but given the time I am not sure we will deliver.
         4. Additional minor improvements in documentation and the integration repo to upload demo scripts for people to run the demo.
         5. Rittwik: O-DU High is ready to integrate with O-DU Low.  
         6. Lusheng: The O-DU High can follow the future enhancement to move feature code in Bronze release, update their release notes.
         7. John Keeney  We don't see the verification jobs when we release.  I assume there will be full integration tests. I want to know if we can help.
         8. Lusheng; The issue is the base image that your docker file requires has expired on the staging docker registry.  We need to generate that first. 
         9. Henrik Anderson: Will the staging jobs be ready?
         10. Lusheng: The LF has two registrys STAGING and RELEASE.  If it's in the staging registry it will live there for 30 days. Jenkins has a job that will regenerate the newest version of the base image. That image gets refreshed.  It will exist in the staging repo.  The build reference is to the previous version of the base image.  We need to figure out to regenerate.  
         11. Henrik: When we push things to the Bronze branch they don't exist in the staging repo.
         12. Lusheng: Let's work offline.
         13. Jack: We are looking for people who will be interested in Integration and Test.  Lusheng will be reducing his time.  We need more participation in the integration and test area beyond their project.  We need coordination work to have a few more people involved.  
      2. CherryTimeline

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

      1. Rittwik: EC has reqested a requirements document for the RAN simulator.  That allows us to socialized with the EC and TOC for bidding for a RAN simulator.
      2. Jack: Any PTL who wants to leverage the simulator beyond planning and generating data should communicate to your their requests and requirements.  Anyone who has needs in that space reach out to user-59b16 for the Cherry release.  Since there is a cost associated we want to make sure we're getting everyone's input.
      3. Are all the use cases finalized for Cherry?
      4. Rittwik: Yes, they are in the wiki and lifecycle management for the SMO and the traffic steering and health-check use cases.
      5. Matti: I have new teams that want to contribute to xApps.  I will reach out to you.

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

   4. Report out from PTL: Stand-Up & Report Out on Blockers 

      1. John Keeney Non-RealTime RIC (RAN Intelligent Controller) (NONRTRIC)

      2. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 

      3. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC)

         1. See status notes under "Status 2020-04-29 and 2020-04-30 and 2020-05-06 and 2020-05-12" in Bronze Release (Jun 2020)

      4. user-a934b O-RAN Centralized Unit (OCU) 

      5. Sachin Srivastava O-RAN Distributed Unit High (ODUHIGH)

      6. Zhimin Yuan O-RAN Distributed Unit Low (ODULOW)

      7. Martin Skorupski Operations and Maintenance (OAM)

      8. Alex Stancu Simulations (SIM)

      9. Xiaohua Zhang Infrastructure (INF)

      10. weichen ni Documentation (DOC)

      11. (TBD) O-RAN Radio Unit (ORU)

10. New Agenda Items (New Business): New Items Submitted (+speaker) & Open Call to TOC For Additional Items. 

11. Planning for Next Meeting

12. Any Other Business (AOB) 

13. Meeting Summary (resolutions, new action items, etc.)

    1. Actions
       1. Action/ user-59b16 add the SMO project to the wiki and gerrit.  
    2. Votes

       1. Review and Agree to Minutes of Previous Meeting 

          1. Vote to approve minutes for 22 Jul 2020 

          2. On motion made by Jinri Huang
          3. Seconded by Juha Oravainen
          4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
       2.  Vote to add the SMO project to O-RAN SC.
          1. On motion made by user-59b16
          2. Seconded by John-Paul Lane
          3. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
       3. On motion made by Lusheng to include a license scan to all repos.
          1. Seconded by Jinri Huang 
          2. Vote taken item passed
       4. On motion made by Lusheng to include a semantic versioning process to all repos.
          1. Seconded by Jinri Huang .
          2. Vote taken item passed

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