Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

VOTE for the B Release!

2019 10 23

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
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl	x
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda	x
   Orange	William Diego		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
   • The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and there were no comments, questions or corrections.
   • Vote to approve minutes for 16 Oct 2019 
   • On motion made by user-2057e
   • Seconded by MASAFUMI MASUDA
   • VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
4. Review of Today's Agenda
5. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)
   1. Tracy Van Brakle and Martin Skorupski to align and document the plugfest plan for a demo video.
      1. Tracy reviewed with several working groups last week.  I am uploading the current slides and a welcome package.  Demo video will record the live demo and read out in zoom and post that in the O-RAN Alliance wiki and the O-RAN-SC wiki.  Unless there are other suggestions for the video?
         1. Good idea we need to figure out how we'll organize our information about our releases from that demo and marketing stand point.
         2. Action Farheen Cefalu Add to the marketing of the Amber release to TOC agenda.  We need to work on a package with WG and LF on what PR we are going to put out.
         3. Call to action for TOC members to lead the Amber release marketing and PR strategy for the Amber release.
         4. Tracy - Talk to Jack offline for the expectations on the vendors.  They are asking questions about PR.  
         5. Action/ Tracy Van Brakle will send out an email to TOC mail list.  We are not going to keep score or pass fail.
         6. Trishan de Lanerolle  support Tracy Van Brakle with PR support.
   2. Jinri Huang will upload presentations and minutes under Events page on the wiki of the face to face meeting. 
      1. user-59b16  reach out to Jinri Huang for slides.
         1. Make sure there is nothing in the documents that O-RAN is not ready to release publicly.
         2. Executive Committee slides can go up?
            1. Let's get a list of what we can put up.  There is a difference between the TOC meetings and the O-RAN Alliance meetings.  We can point to the O-RAN Alliance wiki or else we need permission to share their slides on O-RAN-SC.
            2. Action/ Farheen Cefalu remind Jack about how we want to arrange the events page with O-RAN Alliance slides.
   3. user-d3360 send Jinri Huang the count of committers in gerret.
      1. Amber metrics need to be gathered.  How many committers?
         1. Action/ Trishan de Lanerolle provide a report to John Murray of the analytics around contributions of the Amber release.
      2. LF has a new analytics platform based on code contributions in a project.  
         1. When will the reports be available?
         2. Action/ Farheen Cefalu  add an agenda item for project metrics.
6. Standing Agenda Items (Brief Status of Ongoing Activities)
   1. Release Manager/Release Planning: Weekly TOC Scheduling
      1. We have 2 weeks and then we will have our updated code freeze.
      2. We will freeze code November 2 and then a few weeks of defect fixing, then freeze and branch the code.  We will document the code during the code freeze and then have our release.  Once we branch the code we will return to a maintenance cycle in January.  The maintenance release will run through Feb 1.  This is projected for B.  We have not finalized the B plan.  Dec. 2 we will start Epic identification.  RSAC will come with their use cases and details.  We take off from December 21st to January 6th.  If changes need to be made make them now.  They need to be finalized in the next few weeks.
   2. Report out from PTL: Stand-Up & Report Out on Blockers
      1. Action/ Jack will move the order of the agenda by moving Test to the top during the release process. 
      2. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 
      3. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC)

         1. Below a list of changes to repos (new ones, as well as deletions) under the RICP (near-RT RIC Platform) that we would like the TOC to approve. Parts marked with RICP/RICAPP are proposed by Matti and I (PTLs for RICAPP and RICP) and parts marked with RICP only  me as PTL.

            (WE1) Project RICP
              ric-plt/resource-status-manager
                  - Summary: Implements the management of Resource Status messages over E2
                  - Description: The Resource Status Manager is responsible to control the generation of
                      Resource Status messages sent by the RAN to the RIC by issuing Resource Status Requests.
                      The RSM provides an API that allows to start and stop the generation of these messages as
                      well as to issue specific request commands. The RSM provides also default values which are used
                      whenever a new RAN (eNB) is added to the RIC.
                  - License: Apache 2
                  - Initial committers: (all AT&T) Shuky Har-Noy  ( shuky.har-noy@intl.att.com),  Hila Anina ( hanina@intl.att.com), Yaki Ratz ( yaki.ratz@intl.att.com )

            (WE2) Project RICP/RICAPP
              We (RICP and RICAPP PTL) would like to remove the following repositories:
                 ric-app/demo    (empty)
                 ric-app/reporter (not maintained anymore for 6 months (and actually confusing community if someone uses this as reference) and e.g. the measurement campaign xApp can replace it)
                 com/asn1         (an ASN.1 compiler for which we found that it causes to much issues that we had to troubleshoot. We already switched to using com/asn1c (which is derived from https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_vlm_asn1c&d=DwIFAg&c=LFYZ-o9_HUMeMTSQicvjIg&r=Tnwenk7t78Qk7cMlMZ90EGmbng6eVuV4yQNhqbtpKkk&m=xoq2zMpPhab9uHOEBVXWXAFXjPsyFpAgdbNtyADOnwY&s=Rkl10dXpdSlyLJTKlTd3zwy98meppgWMQ_0PNWZ8QjQ&e=)

            (WE3) Project RICP
               new repo: ric-plt/ric-test
                  - Summary: RIC platform-specific testing that are not specific to a single RIC component
                  - Description: This repo includes test cases that span the full RIC platform, i.e., that cannot run against a single RIC component. This may also include
                      simulators related to the E2 base protocol, or related abstract test xApps (that do not actually implement 3GPP specifications). Note that the test
                      cases must still be limited to RIC platform only. If you want to write/check test cases that integrate also other O-RAN SC components, check
                      the it/test repository.
                  - License: Apache 2
                  - Initial committers: (first one AT&T, the other two from Nokia): Xuan Tuyen Tran (Harry) (tuyen@research.att.com ), Amit Uttam  ( amit.uttam@nokia.com )  and Shashikumar HN ( shashikumar.hn@nokia.com )

            (WE4) Project RICP
               new repo: ric-plt/ric-dep
                  - Summary: Code and configuration files that are needed for deploying a near-RT RIC platform instance
                  - Description: This includes, for example, helm charts for RIC platform components. In this we can make assumptions about the underlying k8s already existing or
                                 we can also spin up blueprints for such a deployment. Note that this component is intentionally limiting itself to the RIC platform and does
                                 not include other O-RAN SC components. For such you might want to look at the it/dep repo managed by another O-RAN SC project.
                  - License: Apache 2
                  - Initial committers: (first one AT&T, the other two from Nokia): Lusheng Ji (lji@research.att.com) , Prabhu K ( prabhu.k@nokia.com )  Ranjit  Angajala   ( ranjit.angajala@nokia.com )

              Note that this needed for legal reasons to clearly define the scope of the near-RT RIC project. It is aligned with a "scope" wiki text that we wrote for the same reason.
              Also note that we continue with the it/dep repo as a general integration repo where any O-RAN SC components can be integrated together. In scope of their work on
              integrating all O-RAN SC components, engineers working on the it/dep repo might re-use some of the functionality that was original committed to ric-plt/ric-dep .

            (WE5) Project RICP/RICAPP
              We would like to remove the empty ric-app/uemgr and instead create a new repo under ric-plt/. This is in order to clearly link
              the demo xApp to the RIC platform project. At the same time also note that the license of this is changed to a documentation
              license. So that its legal scope reflects its actual role in the RIC platform. Naturally there will continue to be actual xApps under the
              RICAPP project. Placing it under the RICP project (and not RICAPP) allows Nokia to contribute to it. The name is intentionally kept
              generic. As part of this change we also move this page https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.o-2Dran-2Dsc.org_display_RICA_UE-2BManager-2BxApp&d=DwIFAg&c=LFYZ-o9_HUMeMTSQicvjIg&r=Tnwenk7t78Qk7cMlMZ90EGmbng6eVuV4yQNhqbtpKkk&m=xoq2zMpPhab9uHOEBVXWXAFXjPsyFpAgdbNtyADOnwY&s=gaI_Yvwbqi4X3KKgd2KlO1cau-oPGsKTpA0lo3SzHeo&e= to the RICP project (a reference
              in RICA continues to refer to it.
              deleted repo: ric-app/uemgr
              new repo: ric-plt/demo1
                  - Summary: A simple demo xApp running on the RIC platform.
                  - Description: Contains a simple demo xApp running on the RIC platform.
                  - License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
                  - Initial committers: (all Nokia) Timo Tietavainen ( timo.tietavainen@nokia.com ), Jussi Maki Aijala (jussi.maki-aijala@nokia.com), Juha Hyttinen (juha.hyttinen@nokia.com) , Anssi Mannila  ( anssi.mannila@nokia.com)

            (WE6) ) Project RICP
              We delete the following repo: ric-plt/ue-nib . The scope of the RIC platform does not include this functionality. If, then
              such functionality should be developed outside of the RIC platform, e.g., under the RICAPP project. Some of the earlier functionality (read and write
              of the demo data that is actually needed in the "demo1" demo xapp (under documentation license) is moved into the demo1 repo as it is
              closely related and does not make too much sense as standalone documentation repo. Note that this implies that the functionality is now under
              document license in ric-plt/demo1

            1. Empty repos are allowed to be deleted.  Repos with content are open source and remain for historical reasons.
               1. Needs to be marked as depricated.  When we complete the Amber release there should not be code dependencies.  Therefore we can remove the repos because this is the first A release.  
            2. The RIC platform as an entity must be open source contained platform.  When you cross over to system integration is work in a different project that will rely on the RIC project but other people on different licenses won't be able to participate.  
               1. E2 was removed due to legal issues.
               2. RIC PLT E2 had files ASN1 files that were not supposed to be there.  That compiler was used in early development but won't be used again.
            3. Concern about putting this in documentation license downstream and someone contributes back to a test repo then it becomes a part of the test by the integration team.
               1. That is acceptable.  
         2. Proposal to make changes to the RIC Platform repos above
         3. On motion made by Thoralf Czichy
         4. Seconded by MASAFUMI MASUDA
         5. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
      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)

         1. During f2f repos were summarized.  3 repos were supposed to be contributed by inspur.  I double checked and they are not using those repos anymore.  They will not be making future contributions.
            1. These are seed code repos that were not a part of the Amber release.  We need to go ahead and clean up and remove those seed repos.  No vote needed.  This is normal clean up.  
            2. Action/ Xiaohua Zhang raise a ticket with LF to remove the seed code projects.
      10. weichen ni Documentation (DOC)
      11. John Keeney Non-RealTime RIC (RAN Intelligent Controller) (NONRTRIC)
      12. (TBD) O-RAN Radio Unit (ORU)

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

      1. Call to all PTLs to give a status report for release preparation.  Action/ user-d3360 post the request through mail list.
      2. Next TOC will occur after daylight savings time.  Not all communities will recognize that shift and that will move this meeting minus 1 hour.
   4. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee
      1. Discussed traffic churn use case with different values.  We should prepare for that.  We are going to look at our spreadsheet of epics consolidate and move on to call flows.  It's in a word document with some call flows.  I am hoping that Thoralf Czichy and Matti Hiltunen will discover algos that will work with xApps.  Talked to Samsung about CU DU binary code for an example.  Jin Sun said their management will look into it.  Radisys agreed to provide a CU DU binary.
         1. As part of the release planning when we get into the B release we identify the epics.  Yes there is an approval.  This is the version of our requirements and use cases as part of the B release.  That package should be brought to the TOC for a vote to freeze the target environments.  
            1. When does that happen?
               1. December 7th once the epics are identified we should freeze it so the projects can commit to B release.  This gives the development team to groom their user stories.
         2. How many end to end use cases?
            1. One
         3. Jack would like to see a simpler e2e  base line "hello world" use case that demonstrates that the platform is working.  It is a simple metrics use case that can exercise the components and return metrics on the different components running in place.  We need a use case that we maintain for the basic level of operation before talking about complex.  We want a base line use case that exercises the system and gathers metrics.  A heartbeat check.  This way everyone is at a base point before advancing their use cased.  There should be a self diagnostic test so the platform is base lined.
         4. user-59b16 post the presentation.
7. New Agenda Items (New Business): New Items Submitted (+speaker) & Open Call to TOC For Additional Items
   1. Action/ Farheen Cefalu  add Summarize F2F meeting at O-RAN Alliance event to next weeks agenda.
   2. Thoralf Czichy  Near-RealTime RIC platform repos that are required.
8. Planning for Next Meeting
   1. Action/ Farheen Cefalu  add Summarize F2F meeting at O-RAN Alliance event to next weeks agenda.
   2. Jack will be adding more items to next weeks agenda.
9. Open Discussion
10. Any Other Business (AOB) 
11. Meeting Summary (resolutions, new action items, etc.)

2019 10 16

Zoom Meeting: 2019-10-16_toc.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
   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.  

3. 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
4. Review of Today's Agenda
5. 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
   • user-bc668 approve O-CU committers.
6. 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.

          
         • Request the addition of two more committers ORDWAY, ADAM G <ao8347@att.com>, LFID ao8347 and MEILINGER, JUSTIN <jx088j@att.com>, LFID jx088j to the it/otf Gerrit repository to help completing the Amber release target.
         • 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
7. 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 a 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.
8. Planning for Next Meeting
9. Open Discussion
10. Any Other Business (AOB) 
11. Meeting Summary (resolutions, new action items, etc.)
    1. Votes
       • 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
       • Create com/asn-to-json-converter repo
         • On motion made by Matti Hiltunen
         • Seconded by Jinri Huang
         • VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
       • Request the addition of two more committers ORDWAY, ADAM G <ao8347@att.com>, LFID ao8347 and MEILINGER, JUSTIN <jx088j@att.com>, LFID jx088j to the it/otf Gerrit repository to help completing the Amber release target.
         • On motion made by user-d3360
         • Seconded by Jinri Huang
         • VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
    2. Actions
       • Tracy Van Brakle and Martin Skorupski to align and document the plugfest plan for a demo video.
       • Jinri Huang will upload presentations and minutes under Events page on the wiki of the face to face meeting. 
       • user-d3360 send Jinri Huang the count of committers in gerret.

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