Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

TOC Voting Members 

*Quorum: 50% or more of total TOC voting members unless excluded due to attendance.

2019 10 16

Agenda

• Call for Scribe (minutes owner) Farheen Cefalu

• Roll Call & Quorum Check 

  Company	Contact Name	Attendance	Alternate Contact	Attendance
  AT&T	Jack Murray Co-Chair	x
  China Mobile	Jinri Huang Co-Chair	x
  Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl
  NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda
  Orange	William Diego		Vincent Danno
  Verizon	Viswa Kumar	x

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

• Review and Agree to Minutes of Previous Meetings
  • The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and there were no comments, questions or corrections.
  • Vote to approve minutes for 09 Oct 2019 
  • On motion made by Jinri Huang
  • Seconded by user-bc668
  • VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
• Review of Today's Agenda
• Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)
  • Tracy Van Brakle and Martin Skorupski to align and document the plugfest plan for a demo video.
    • Where are the presentations from the face to face meeting.
      • Create a file list under the Events page in the wiki.
    • Face to face meeting discussions and meetings notes or recordings.
      • Action/ Jinri Huang will upload presentation and minutes under Events page. 
  • Jinri Huang  expand on the events page with anything that is relevant to the Plugfest.
  • Matti Hiltunen document the simulator test on the RSAC space in the wiki. 
    • The need for the simulator and what function it has at this time.
    • The testing should be in the simulator or the xApp or the integration and test spaces.
    • The ask was to have the simulator for hand sets so the they could drive use cases.
    • The RSAC needs a proposal for a use case.
  • user-d3360 talk to Jack about which use cases are being covered by the test and integration team, for release B.
    • Open source community will focus on demonstrating the advancement of the contributions while the use cases can drive the future activities.
    • Chance to contribute an end to end use case.
    • Action/ TOC provide user-59b16 with end to end use cases in the RSAC Committee.
      • The work begins to have the system engineering done.
      • We will discuss and document a detailed use case in this mornings working group.
      • Radisys will hinge on the DU project.
        • If a black box version of their DU can be provided.
          • Ganesh - Rittwik's proposal is regarding black box/ binary contribution.
          • It is an open call.  If Samsung wants to provide the interface from CU DU it does not have to be open source until future releases.
  • John Keeney discuss renaming of non-RT RIC.
    • We concluded last week that we don't want to re-name the non-RT RIC
  • John Keeney  provide alignment slide for f2f meeting to Jinri Huang
  • Action/TOC continue review the Nokia proposal for the near-RT RIC and return with feedback.
  • Action/TOC approve committers for user-a934b
  • Action/ user-bc668 approve O-CU committers.
• Standing Agenda Items (Brief Status of Ongoing Activities)
  1. Release Manager/Release Planning: Weekly TOC Scheduling
  2. Report out from PTL: Stand-Up & Report Out on Blockers
     1. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 
        1. Matti Hiltunen I request a repo that will be managed by the RICAPP project (for now):

        2. com/asn-to-json-converter

           • Summary: A streaming application that receives ASN.1 messages via Kafka and publishes them as JSON via Kafka
           • Description: The ASN1 to JSON converter is a Kafka Streamer application that received from the E2Terminator messages with ASN1 Binary payload    (PER) that is encoded in Base64 and convert it to textual JSON that can be consumed by other applications. The converter receives the packed messages on an input Kafka Topic and publishes the input on dedicated output topics. Aligned with O1 tracing. Can be used for traces from any component that uses ASN.1 message format.
           • License: Apache 2
           • Initial committers: Shuky Har-Noy  (shuky.har-noy@intl.att.com),  Hila Anina (hanina@intl.att.com), Yaki Ratz (yaki.ratz@intl.att.com) 
        3. Create com/asn-to-json-converter repo
           • On motion made by Matti Hiltunen
           • Seconded by Jinri Huang
           • VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
     2. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC)
     3. user-a934b O-RAN Centralized Unit (OCU)
     4. Sachin Srivastava O-RAN Distributed Unit High (ODUHIGH)
     5. Zhimin Yuan O-RAN Distributed Unit Low (ODULOW)
     6. Martin Skorupski Operations and Maintenance (OAM)
     7. Alex Stancu Simulations (SIM)

     8. Xiaohua Zhang Infrastructure (INF)

     9. weichen ni Documentation (DOC)
     10. John Keeney Non-RealTime RIC (RAN Intelligent Controller) (NONRTRIC)
     11. (TBD) O-RAN Radio Unit (ORU)

  3. user-d3360 Test & Integration Planning (INT)

     1. Request for adding committers for the integration and test open frame work.

     2. Dear O-RAN SC ToC,

        We would like to request the addition of two more committers to the it/otf Gerrit repository to help completing the Amber release target.:

        ORDWAY, ADAM G <ao8347@att.com>, LFID ao8347;

        MEILINGER, JUSTIN <jx088j@att.com>, LFID jx088j.

         
        • On motion made by user-d3360
        • Seconded by Jinri Huang
        • VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
          • Action/ user-d3360 send Jinri Huang the count of committers.
     3. In the building how much code is residing?
        1. Source code repo is a recipe.  The source code is not imported into the repo.  It is the recipe that puts it there.
        2. During build time the upstream.
           1. Is the resulting build unique to our project so O-RAN SC will use that work.
              1. Yes, it is optimized kernel and the packages.
                 1. Be careful in impacting all of our other resources and projects.
                 2. How often do you need to rebuild this?
                    1. No, we want to build once per release or patch releases.  Maybe one or two times per release should be good.
                    2. Concerns about managing the resource consuming job.  Work with Lusheng to schedule time early in the process so we can be efficient in the resources across projects and not block others.
     4. Lusheng - tonight will provide the full report at the f2f.
  4. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee
• New Agenda Items (New Business): New Items Submitted (+speaker) & Open Call to TOC For Additional Items
  • Jun Hyuk Song binary seed code submission.
    • We thought seed code is possible through open source.  Binary is not an option on the table.  We are reluctant to open our code to binary code.  We learned binary code is being submitted by another vendor.
      • Jack - This is a rich topic for discussion.  In open source the code is open and people can look and contribute.  We've had discussions with companies about including the binary code as an option.  Binary code is not a contribution to the open source community.  However binary code can be used for integration and test.  For example Intel wanted to keep their layer 1 software.  They didn't have to contribute that software.  Instead they are contributing a loader module that will pull in their binary from their location.  The process to get their code is consistent.  The open source community doesn't treat it as open source but instead uses it for test and integration.  In this case the O-DU could choose to license from Intel and build it into their process.  Intel would contribute the loader.  The binary itself is not open source.  The company would have to deal with Intel directly for their binary.  They are not open source but are build, test, and integration options.  The build APIs are open source.
      • Jinri - Do we need to discuss this with the O-RAN legal team?
        • The broader issue for us is that it is hosted by the Linux Foundation.  These contributions aren't in source code.  Theoretically, if you could contribute binary it would have to under one of our two licenses meaning people could use it.  That is not their intent.  It is best for them to keep their code under their management.  If we use it for integration and test then O-RAN would have to set up how to make it available for us to use.
    • Jun Hyuk Song  TOC membership.  There are open vacancies for the TOC membership.  
      
      • Jack - We want to promote open source developers.  Interest in viable candidate to contribute open source code.
    • Jun Hyuk Song What about xApps?  Are there requirements for that?
      • Jack- We didn't put a hard requirement on contributing magnitude of code.  Demonstrate your interest in the activity and the community.
  • F2F Summary
  • Samsung - contributions in the form of binary code.
• Planning for Next Meeting
• Open Discussion
• Any Other Business (AOB) 
• Meeting Summary (resolutions, new action items, etc.)

2019 10 09

Zoom Meeting: 2019-10-09_toc_audio_only.m4a

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
   China Mobile	Jinri Huang Co-Chair	x
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl	x
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda	x
   O-RANge	William Diego	x	Vincent Danno
   Verizon	Viswa Kumar

   *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 Meetings
   1. The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and there were no comments, questions or corrections.
      1. Vote to approve minutes for 02 Oct 2019 
      2. On motion made by Jinri Huang
      3. Seconded by user-2057e
         VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
4. Review of Today's Agenda
5. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)
   • Tracy Van Brakle to provide writeup next week as base for Plugfest blog, etc.
   • Tracy Van Brakle and Martin Skorupski to align and document the plugfest plan for a demo video.
     • There will be a demo next week.  Not tested yet.
     • Call to all O-RAN Alliance working group members to propose more demonstrations for the plugfest on this call.
   • Farheen Cefalu add to the wiki events page. Follow up with Tracy and Jinri. (Plugfest).
   • Jinri Huang  expand on the events page with anything that is relevant to the Plugfest.
   • Jinri Huang to talk to CMCC how to promote at Beijing plugfest.  Jinri will report back 09 Oct 2019 
     • 2 sessions.  1 in Beijing (China Mobile).  Jinri will use Martin and Tracy's demo video for the Beijing session.  
   • user-2057e start a poll for B release. 
   • Matti Hiltunen document the simulator test on the RSAC space in the wiki. 
   • user-59b16 place a formal approval request for code freeze extension.
     • Extend the code freeze to October 18 or October 25.  
   • user-59b16 publish the meeting details on the RSAC page regarding WG3 and E2.
     • We had two meetings today to align all the WGs and projects.  ODU and Infra still have to update but we are in good shape for the f2f.
   • user-d3360 talk to Jack about which use cases are being covered by the test and integration team, for release B.
     • Trying to get people from other projects and companies more involved because it requires a lot of activities that need to test their items. Code testing and end to end use cases drive the OSC solutions that we promote work.  The integration and test team will be driven by the end to end use cases that we pick as a community for our release.  This is important for the discussion next week.  RSAC have a clear managable set of use cases that demonstrate the value and capability of where we are in the O-RAN stack to the community and beyond.  You can only have a certain amount of end to end use cases.  The team has to focus on these use cases as a primary goal.  End to end use cases are the primary driver to demonstrate what the release can be used for.
       • Rittwik - If you want a full stack ete demo it will require CUs and DUs who won't be ready until the B release.
         • The goal is trying to demonstrate functionality towards the goal.  Simulators can be used.  We have to show the community is advancing in it's goals.  The spirit of end to end is talking about broader functionality and not just the individual.  Write an end to end use case around Martin's demo.  Integration and Test team should develop a plan to evaluate an end to end use case.
   • John Keeney discuss renaming of near non real time RIC.
     • People are complaining about which is the real name of RIC?  People don't like typing the extra words "near real time..." or "non real time ..."
       • Jinri spoke to O-RAN TSC.  There are difference of opinions in WG1.  Keep it open until later.
         • Martin - Do you have a proposal because it has implications to O-RAN Alliance.
           • John - I propose that we don't change it.
             • Jack - Better to change it now rather than later.  It will become harder to make the changes across documenation and it will have a ripple effect throughout the projects.
   • John Keeney discuss the relationship with the upstream projects such as Acumos and Akraino.
     • Asking for feedback on relationships with upstreams projects.  Do other people have other discussions?
       • Yes lots of discussions in the background.  See new Partnerships link in the top navigation bar.  We have slides we will share and put on the agenda in the coming weeks.  We will pick one of the projects and talk through it.  We are starting to document which ones we are interacting with and we have develop a breakdown of what our interactions is with.
       • Irfan Ghauri - Are there collaboration agreements?
         • In open source there are no formal collaborations except for O-RAN Alliance, 3GPP, and ETSI.  They require formal collaborations
         • Jinri raised a concern about the putting the O-RAN Alliance in the Partnership category.
           • It is not owned by O-RAN Alliance.
           • Peter Moonki Hong - How do the open source developers refer to the other collaborative projects such as Akraino?  For example I am a developer who would like to test O-RAN software stack and there are other components from Akraino.  Could you provide formal guidance of how we interact with the partnerships?
             • Jack - In the near term start by reaching out to Lusheng about integration.  Akraino is a part of the INF project it's early.  We have contacts from Akraino.  Acumos is being used by the Near real time RIC dashboard.  Reach out to the TSC in those projects.  We will expand the partnerships with a list of contacts.
   • Jinri Huang discuss PTLs slide preparation for the F2F meeting.
     • Top mission is the complete the alignment with the working group at the face to face meeting.
     • Rittwik - preparing one slide deck for discussing the near real time RIC.  We should sit in the WG3 meeting. 
       • From Non Real Time RIC we presented our alignment with WG2.  WG1 and WG6 I am quite confused about the scope and architecture when it comes to the Non real time RIC.
         • Can you share the slides with the community?
           • Yes, there is one slide.
             • Jinri needs to see whether these items are aligned.  
               • John Keeney  provide alignment slide for f2f meeting to Jinri Huang
     • Jinri requesting all the working groups to present their slides by the end of this week.
6. Standing Agenda Items (Brief Status of Ongoing Activities)
   1. Release Manager/Release Planning: Weekly TOC Scheduling
      • There is a formal request.  In the Amber release this schedule was ambitious process.  One of the goals is to get people to get familiar and start contributing.  Code freeze is supposed to occur at the end of this week.  The developers enter a maintenance cycle.  To get a release out we add a maintenance release.  So the developers can continue to fix defects while everyone plans on what the new features are in the B release.  This next window October 14 - November 2 is time to work on fixing bugs on the software only for this release.  We should allow this extension because there is not enough code to do end to end testing.
      • The proposal is to move the code freeze date to add a development sprint 5.  Focus on getting the code as mature as possible for Amber to make it useful.  This is a one time event.
        • Jinri agrees to delay. 
        • Extend the release schedule code freeze from October to November 2.  On motion made by Jinri Huang seconded by  user-2057e
          • VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
   2. Report out from PTL: Stand-Up & Report Out on Blockers
      1. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 
      2. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC)
         1. For legal reasons we need a controlled way to define the scope of the near-RT RIC platform. Concrete suggestion is here. The basic idea is a description of scope and RICP project meeting approval for changes to that scope plus TOC approval for new repos. Additionally we would like the following sentence in the beginning of each file (in addition to the copyright and license statement):  "This source code is part of the near-RT RIC (Radio Intelligent Controller) platform project (RICP)." (suggested by legal dept.). Jack's opinion on the extra sentence needed. The rest of the procedure was ok-ed by RICP project meeting.
            1. Jack will review the proposal.
            2. David - keep Paul in the loop to avoid surprises.
            3. John - The title should be updated.
            4. Action/TOC continue review the proposal and return with feedback
         2. E2AP documentation now available as document (PDF/DOCX) plus ASN.1 file: https://gerrit.o-ran-sc.org/r/gitweb?p=ric-plt/asn1-documents.git;a=tree
         3. RICP presentation at ONS, Antwerpen, 2019: Overall architecture (not component-specific)
      3. user-a934b O-RAN Centralized Unit (OCU)
         1. Request for approval of the committer.
      4. Sachin Srivastava O-RAN Distributed Unit High (ODUHIGH)
      5. Zhimin Yuan O-RAN Distributed Unit Low (ODULOW)
      6. Martin Skorupski Operations and Maintenance (OAM)
      7. Alex Stancu Simulations (SIM)

      8. Xiaohua Zhang Infrastructure (INF)

      9. weichen ni Documentation (DOC)
      10. John Keeney Non-RealTime RIC (RAN Intelligent Controller) (NONRTRIC)
      11. (TBD) O-RAN Radio Unit (ORU)

   3. user-d3360 Test & Integration Planning (INT)

   4. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee
7. New Agenda Items (New Business): New Items Submitted (+speaker) & Open Call to TOC For Additional Items
   1. Discuss OSC Partners and Open Source alignment
8. Planning for Next Meeting
9. Open Discussion
10. Any Other Business (AOB) 
    1. PTLs attend user-d3360 meeting for Integration and Test.
11. Meeting Summary (resolutions, new action items, etc.)
    1. Votes
       1. The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and there were no comments, questions or corrections.
          1. Vote to approve minutes for 02 Oct 2019 
          2. On motion made by Jinri Huang
          3. Seconded by user-2057e
             VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
       2. Seeking approval from TOC for new code freeze date for Amber release to Oct 18 (or Oct 25). TOC to recommend a suitable date for code freeze.
          • Extend the release schedule code freeze date to November 2. 
            • On motion made by Jinri Huang 
            • Seconded by  user-2057e
            • VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
    2. Actions
       1. Tracy Van Brakle and Martin Skorupski to align and document the plugfest plan for a demo video.
       2. Jinri Huang  expand on the events page with anything that is relevant to the Plugfest.
       3. Matti Hiltunen document the simulator test on the RSAC space in the wiki. 
       4. user-d3360 talk to Jack about which use cases are being covered by the test and integration team, for release B.
       5. John Keeney discuss renaming of near non real time RIC.
       6. John Keeney  provide alignment slide for f2f meeting to Jinri Huang

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