Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

2020 04 29

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		Weichen Ni	x
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl	x	Ondřej Hudousek
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda	x	Anil Umesh
   Orange	William Diego	x	Vincent Danno
   Verizon	Viswa Kumar		Kristen Young
   Nokia	Juha Oravainen		Thoralf Czichy	x
   Radisys	Ganesh Shenbagaraman	x	Sachin Srivastava
   Ericsson	John-Paul Lane	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 Meeting 

   1. The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and there were no comments, questions or corrections.
      1. Vote to approve minutes for 22 Apr 2020 
      2. On motion made by David Streibl
      3. Seconded by weichen ni
      4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
   2. Clarify comments about questions about 9.iii.a needed clarity so Farheen updated minutes.

4. Review of Today's Agenda

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. Jack: we will need to vote on how to support the Viavi simulator as a part of our test environment.  At some point we will have to bring to vote a decision to request for funding to support a part of the bronze activity.  We are looking at it as a rental fee on the open source side.  People from Viavi are on the technical side. 
   2. If people are interested in this topic reach out to Lusheng Ji or Rittwik Jana.  One of our challenges working in the RAN at some point we have to have devices and radios to simulator.  We have a small effort on simulating protocols but RAN simulator is more active.  The short term activity is how do we deal with this in Bronze without a full operating stack.  
   3. We need more paticipation in the test department.  There is a lot of activity going on there.
   4. ORAN Alliance and O-RAN SC are two different leadership. 
      1. Open source focus group in O-RAN Alliance.
      2. TOC is focus group in O-RAN SC.
      3. OSFG is asked to take a vote.  There are recommendations of the OSFG group in the O-RAN Alliance and there are votes for the TOC for the O-RAN SC.
      4. John-Paul Is there any information about the specification project?
         1. Jack: The O-RAN SC has a charter under the LF.  We follow LF guidelines.  O-RAN Alliance funds the LF for the O-RAN SC to operate under 2 licenses.
            1. Apache open source initiative.
            2. O-RAN Alliance license.  I am not a lawyer it is managed by the software alliance entity.  We use the Apache license, Documentation is slightly different.  The O-RAN license is managed by the O-RAN Alliance.  I do not call this an open source license.  In this forum I refer to it as a FRAND license.  We're an open source community we have the Apache license and the FRAND license from the O-RAN Alliance.  
            3. Jack: Look at the charter.  The charter for the OSC is an LLC founded in the USA under a series of LLC under the Linux Foundation.  We also have the O-CU and O-DU High.
            4. Jack: It is intended to mimic 3GPP and the O-RAN FRAND policy.  I am not a lawyer.

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

   1. Virtual Exhibition.

7. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. Action / Jinri Huang work with Farheen to add the MWC demos and presentations to the O-RAN SC wiki once posted to the O-RAN Alliance.
   2. Action/ William Diego Maza update on the coordination with the O-RAN test group
      1. William we are working with Viavi to establish a date.  Planning to integrate into the Cherry release timeline.
      2. Jack: I try to give people more time.  I encourage people to work ahead of the next release.  People should be thinking about participating the requirements for Cherry.  This way when we start talking full time about Cherry we are ready.
      3. We will need both long and short term 
   3. Action/ William Diego Maza send John Murray the dates from the TIFG slide deck so he can add it to the Cherry Release timeline.
   4. Action / TOC Martin: We want to have data modeling on the wiki in a broader way.
      1. Martin will add a new page and link to the Program Developer Guide.
   5. Action/ Zhimin Yuan Sachin Srivastava come up with a timeline of your activities with Lusheng Ji because you are not going to make the timeline for the Bronze release.  Try to come up with a plan that will be able to be delivered in the Bronze Maint release for the FAPI and the O-DU Low and High.
      1. Zhimin: we did a lot of time on this.  
      2. Sachin: sharing slide deck.  Adding points.  We are discussing integrating plan.  We talk to Viavi about O-RU and O-CU.
         1. Trying to break into pieces.  Each piece has less dependecies.  We can do the P5 message integration using our own O-RU and O-CU stack.  But the dependency is properly installed and configured.  For O-DU high and O-DU low we got some agreement.
         2. Test Cases Profile For Example is very important for RAN Integration.  We need guidance of which section we should start.
         3. We have had discussions with Lusheng and Rittwik to move forward with the Cherry and Dawn release.  We have had a few gaps with O-DU High and O-DU Low.  We are targeting the P5 messages exchanged between High and Low.  We will be using the third dependency we will be using the L1 and L2 loss because there is no FAPI detector.  From a target perspective we will be targeting the P5 messages using the stub from O-CU.  Going forward we will need to define the use case call flows test plan where we can use O-RU and O-CU.
         4. Jack: Aknowledges and appreciates everyones effort.  Getting the P5 messages are a positive step forward.  P5 is something that will work in the Bronze release or the Cherry Release?
         5. Sachin:
            1. When we will hve the O-DU server to start testing.  I will need help with Lusheng.
            2. Configure the O-DU low and O-DU high. 
            3. Once we have agreement on these two points we will be able to provide a time estimate.  We will be using the Intel software in the lab to save time.
            4. Jack: We have had the Intel software reviewed by the O-RAN legal team.  You can use it.  It will be discussed at the TSC meeting and no one raises concerns we can move forward with using it.  Since it has passed legal review it should be OK.  We are setting up the lab with the servers.  I am making sure that the servers will be available.  I am in charge of that.  Delays are due to everyone working from home.
            5. Action/ Farheen Cefalu add the longer term test strategy to the agenda.  Get it from Lusheng.
            6. Jack: The binary software should never be loaded into the LF repos.  It is built and deployed into the machines.  We have legal clearance to use it but I still have to get the TSC to approve.  We can start a second O-DU software to use a different approach.  Our goal is not to limit ourselves to one option. 
            7. Rittwik: Intel can only give permission by the end of May.  Does this mean we can start working in the lab and have phase 1 tested.
            8. Jack: We have been given legal clearance that we can use it.  As a risk item you can use it but it can't become a part of the official release policy.  
            9. Sachin: O-DU High we had a discussion.  It can be used to do the initial integration.  
            10. Lusheng: It can be a part of Bronze.  It can be integrated with the near Real Time RIC.
            11. Jack: How are we tracking the completeness in a release.  Are we planning to deliver 20% - 50%.  At some time we want to state that success when we do the interoperability testing.
   6. O-RAN Alliance Copyright update
      1. We are working the issue in detail.  Lawyers and board work approvals are ongoing.  It is a logistical issue.  There are no concerns about doing it but how to do it properly.  Part of the challenge is asking for approvals by paragraphs for specifications so we are trying to find out the implementation details.

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

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

      1. Project Bronze Release

      2. Does the time extension apply to all repos.
      3. No only the ones that request exentension.
      4. Lusheng: We have 4 tracks. for healthcheck we have to find out what can be delivered and what needs to be tested.  We need to have discussion with Martin, John, and Thoralf.

   2. Rittwik Jana Requirements Software Architecture Committee

   3. Lusheng Ji  Integration and Test

      1. Gerrit review process improvement
      2. Integration and testing status report
         

   4. Report out from PTL: Stand-Up & Report Out on Blockers - next week we will start to cover this list.  Are there any major items that anyone would like to raise to the TOC this week? 

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

      2. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 

      3. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC) 

      4. Yingying Wang O-RAN Centralized Unit (OCU) 

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

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

         1. Code is planned to be available on May 31.  Can we have O-DU Low for the Bronze release package?
         2. Jack: That puts us at the end of any cycle.  Can we work to put it into the Bronze maintenance release to give us enough time to test.
         3. Zhimin: The testing will be handled before May 31.  
         4. Jack: We will need to discuss further and we are near the end of the meeting.  We don't release code unless it has gone through the open source testing.  
         5. Action / Farheen Cefalu add this topic to the top of the agenda next week.

      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)

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

   1. OAI purposed Meeting
      1. Jack OSC wants a discussion with OSC.  
      2. OAI meeting is taking place?  
         1. Initial meeting between OSC and OAI TOC.  To see if they want to participate as an upstream project and a separate project.
         2. John-Paul: When will the invitation be sent?
         3. Action/ Jack: I will post that.  They have suggested some dates.
   2. OSC Logo

10. Planning for Next Meeting

11. Any Other Business (AOB) 

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

2020 05 06

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		Lusheng Ji
   China Mobile	Jinri Huang Co-Chair		Weichen Ni
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl		Ondřej Hudousek
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda		Anil Umesh
   Orange	William Diego		Vincent Danno
   Verizon	Viswa Kumar		Kristen Young
   Nokia	Juha Oravainen		Thoralf Czichy
   Radisys	Ganesh Shenbagaraman		Sachin Srivastava
   Ericsson	John-Paul Lane

   *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 

4. Review of Today's Agenda

5. Release Votes and Approval

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

   1. Virtual Exhibition.

7. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

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

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

      1. Project Bronze Release

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

      1. Gerrit review process improvement
      2. Integration and testing status report
         

   4. Report out from PTL: Stand-Up & Report Out on Blockers - next week we will start to cover this list.  Are there any major items that anyone would like to raise to the TOC this week? 

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

      2. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 

      3. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC) 

      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)

         1. status update

      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)

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

   1. OAI purposed Meeting
   2. OSC Logo

10. Planning for Next Meeting

11. Any Other Business (AOB) 

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

2020 04 22

Recording: 2020-04-22_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	Lusheng Ji
   China Mobile	Jinri Huang Co-Chair	x	Weichen Ni
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl		Ondřej Hudousek
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda	x	Anil Umesh
   Orange	William Diego		Vincent Danno
   Verizon	Viswa Kumar		Kristen Young
   Nokia	Juha Oravainen	x
   Radisys	Ganesh Shenbagaraman	x	Sachin Srivastava
   Ericsson	John-Paul Lane	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 Meeting 

   1. The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and there were no comments, questions or corrections.
      1. Vote to approve minutes for 15 Apr 2020 
      2. On motion made by Jinri Huang
      3. Seconded by John-Paul Lane
      4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed

4. Review of Today's Agenda

   1. Rittwik requesting time extension for RIC App and E2 SIM enhancements.  This will be covered during Rittwik's status.
   2. Jack: O-AI offered to discuss align or collaborate.
   3. Lusheng: Added two items under integration and test section.
   4. John Keeney: Wants to ask a question about Licensing

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. Vote Release Name for D release is Dawn.

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

   1. ONES = LF Networking Conference tentatively August/ September (Los Angeles).  Open Networking & Edge Summit Event


   2. Virtual exhibition meeting will be open soon.  Jinri will be meeting with O-RAN Alliance.
   3. Last week people discussed the virtual meeting for June to replace the face to face due to COVID-19.
      1. the virtual meeting will be a little different.
      2. Action/ Jinri Huang  work with Farheen to mark this as an open item.
   4. Jack: There is one marketing item.  Most other open source projects have a logo.  In the early days we talked about creating a logo for O-RAN SC.  It got pushed to the background.  The LF will help with registering a logo.  If a TOC member is interested in taking it on let the TOC know.  It's nice to have and takes time to work through different peoples ideas.  
   5. Jack: I will be replacing the LF Edgeboard AT&T employee.  I will keeping these activities separate.  I wanted to let this team know.

7. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. Action / Jinri Huang work with Farheen to add the MWC demos and presentations to the O-RAN SC wiki once posted to the O-RAN Alliance.

   2. Action/ Farheen Cefalu work with Tracy Van Brakle to update the events page with plugfests. 

   3. Action/ William DIEGO update on coordination with the O-RAN test group

      1. William presenting slides.
      2. Idea is to have different ETE test spec coordination between O-RAN (Test Integration Focus Group) and OSC.
      3. Jack suggested to add use cases and tools.  We want to make sure we are aligning on the ETE use cases.  The use cases will drive software and drive it back to the TIFG.
      4. Is OSS Open Source Software? 
      5. Yes, up to now we are integrating different software 
      6. William: This scheme tries to illustrate the test and integration framework.
      7. John: Do you mean no Real time RIC?
      8. William: In this first version we will not integrate the RIC.
      9. John: Proprietary OAM interfaces there's no real time RIC there's no A1.
      10. Eng Wei the ETE framework includes all the O-RAN Alliance specifications and all the requirements.  We will be mapping from a subsystem perspective.  Allow blueprint deployment.  What to do via subsystem level.  all the specs will be in place day 1.  Telecom Italia wants to validate the RIC using use cases. Dynamic traffic steering is something they need to use as well.
      11. Jack: I agree with everyone here.  This baseline scenario does not leverage what we have today.
      12. Rittwik: Yes, because ORU is being tested in Bronze.
      13. Jack: But we don't have O-RU?
      14. Yes,
      15. Jack: The way this picture is described is legacy.  As part of the plan for Cherry we have to start understanding how we are going to play into these.  I like your picture on timeline.  We should fold these key dates into our timeline on our release management.
      16. Action/ William DIEGO send John Murray the dates from the TIFG slide deck.
   4. Action/ William DIEGO provide more details of how the use cases and Jira items reflect the activities.  simple flow diagram of our activities and their activities and how they are going to work together.
   5. Action/ PTLs provide user-d3360  with your sprint 3 demo dates.
   6. Action/ Martin Skorupski add the link for the yang model to the wiki. https://forge.etsi.org/rep/3GPP/SA5/data-models/tree/master/yang-models
      1. Martin: We want to have data modeling on the wiki in a broader way.

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

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

      1. Project Bronze Release

      2. Rittwik: Asking for two weeks to add on to the end of the timeline.

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

      1. Rittwik requesting time extension for RIC App and E2 SIM enhancements.  This will be covered during Rittwik's status.
      2. There are 3 key pieces
         1. Viavi sim files need to come thru.  
         2. Once those files are produced the E2 sim is getting enhanced.  Alex will run with it.
         3. Once E2 format is formed the xApps can start consuming.
      3. We want to make some progress to help gear what we want to do in the next release.  A lot of parties have to get together.  It is better to get this done now.
      4. Alex: What Rittwik said is what I am aware of.  I am talking to Ron and things are going well.
      5. Jack: The code we're talking about is primarily in the simulator project.
      6. Matti: KPI, Traffic steering xApps and ML.  Ron's time is being split between sim and xapp and we lost a developer.  All the interfaces are nailed down so the development can occur in parallel.
      7. Jack: If we stay on the current schedule what kind of functionality will be available.  We have two options we can slide the test date out or stay on schedule and bring some functionality to the maintenance release.
      8. Matti: If you scroll up to the previous screen.  Right now we are at the end of dev sprint 4.  The good thing is the changes between simulator, xapps, and platform will be simpler because we don't need to integrate O-CU, O-DU. 
      9. Rittwik: it's OK to demonstrate in parts.  It's important and will resonate.
      10. Jack: We do ETE sprint testing and then another two weeks of ETE testing.
      11. Lusheng: We are OK.  We will have three separate tracks.  Since this extension impacts Traffic Steering use case.  It is fine to schedule the testing for this track a little later.  We can take a phased approach.  Finish testing of phase one.  We can complete within the release schedule.
      12. Zhimin: O-DU low and O-DU high need an extension to finish development to May 17.  We are following the Intel process.  I need two weeks more.
      13. Jack: It looks like 3 weeks more.
      14. Zhimin: Yes, May 17.  After Intel process we are looking at May 31.  Code freeze is May 17.  
      15. Jack: That's three weeks behind the deadline.  This has to do with developing inside Intel and then dumping them out.  It is best practice to contribute code as you develop for collaboration in open source.
      16. Lusheng: It' not like other components like docker containers.  This is tighter integration.  
      17. Action/ Zhimin Yuan provide a time of when you will be able to deliver?
      18. Sachin: From O-DU High we are going to have the code ready but the integration will take four to five weeks.
      19. Action/ Zhimin Yuan Sachin Srivastava come up with a timeline of your activities with user-d3360 because you are not going to make the timeline for the Bronze release.  Try to come up with a plan that will be able to be delivered in the Bronze Maint release for the FAPI and the O-DU Low and High.  Please try to get it in the B release window.  It's important to have in the Bronze release.  We need to stick with the timeline and deliver the functionality and work into the open source repos and pay attention to the timelines.

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

      1. Gerrit review process improvement 
         1. Lusheng: presenting a deck.  During the release I took at the current practice and making some suggestions. gerret requires +2 reviews after jenkins job has passed.  Then the submission becomes mergable.  The problem is if the submitter is a committer as well he can submit the code and give a +2 and merge the code.  We are losing the advantage of using gerret.  There is an improved merging policy call NACR Non-authore code review. 
         2. Ask TOC to move forward with the +2 requirement.  
         3. Jack: Are you asking to use it Bronze or Cherry?
         4. Lusheng: Either way I recommend we start on Cherry due to time delays.
         5. Jack Let's talk about it more next week.  We are not going to change it.
         6. Lusheng: Another practice is to limiting the submission size.  Gerret will block submissions exceeding certain size limits.  Something for us to consider what we want to adopt.  We want to do all the code changes in gerret open source because there is a 5000 lines of code limit. 
      2. Branching and testing strategy
         1. Once testing starts do not adding code to the master branch.  By code freeze we are expecting bug fixes and documentation fixes to the master branch.
         2. For all the repos the code freeze date is this weekend.  Repos involved are the traffic steering use case and the O-DU low and O-DU high.  Branching strategy diagram it is starting the code freeze time and some members of the team create a development branch and put your development code on the development branches.  Once completed make a branch for Bronze.  This time we are going to use all lower case "b". 
         3. After you branch the master branch is open for development again.  If new bugs are being discovered then fix and cherry pick for the head.  It should be the best for the B release.
         4. For healthcheck here are the projects involved from RSAC implementation.
         5. Track 1: We'll finish the RSAC flows.  Track: 2 Approach is the same for call flows. Track 3 O-DU Integration.
         6. Testing Plan 
         7. Testing Set Up we will be using the open public AT&T T-Lab.  For track 2 and 2 we are going to use 2 VMs.  One will run near realtime RIC and the other will run SMO, O-RAN Lite

   4. Report out from PTL: Stand-Up & Report Out on Blockers - next week we will start to cover this list.  Are there any major items that anyone would like to raise to the TOC this week? 

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

      2. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 

      3. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC) 

      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)

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

   1. OAI purposed Meeting
   2. Licensing: John O-RAN Alliance specs.  What is the relationship with O-SC and O-RAN Alliance regarding licensing?
      1. Jinri: Stefan prepared documentation.  EC discussed this and propose it hopes that the board can give the authority to approve a similar request in the future to save time.  
      2. Regarding re-using of the spec there is not specific request for this.
      3. John Keeney send John Murray your question regarding licensing.
         1. O-RAN Alliance can not grant copyright until specification has been approved.
            1. Jack has been informed that If a company has copyright priv. it does retain a copyright priv and can get clarification from the O-RAN Alliance legal team.
            2. Content in messages requires a separate copyrite.  They don't want us to release the whole specifications in open source.  It's the content of those messages needs to be copyrights on.
            3. John: it's for the schema definition.
            4. Jack: Send me a note and I want to put it on the list.

10. Planning for Next Meeting

11. Any Other Business (AOB) 

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

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