Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

2020 05 20

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. Copyright updates

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

   1. Virtual Exhibition.

   2. OSC Logo status.

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. Action/ William DIEGO update on the coordination with the O-RAN test group
   2. Action/ William DIEGO and user-59b16 lead the effort to organize a long term discussion with Viavi about the coordinated view of the test group and their activities.
   3. Action/ Jinri Huang status of the O-CU 5G contributions to repos.
   4. Action/ TOC continue last weeks review of projects.

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

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

      1. Bronze Timeline

      2. Review Bronze Release Highlights

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

   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)

         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.)

2020 05 13

Zoom recording: 2020-05-13_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	Lusheng Ji
   China Mobile	Jinri Huang Co-Chair	x	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	x	Thoralf Czichy
   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 06 May 2020 
      2. On motion made by Juha Oravainen
      3. Seconded by user-2057e
      4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed

4. Review of Today's Agenda

   1. Add O-RAN Distributed Unit Low (ODULOW) May 31st Bronze delivery request to the top of the agenda because we ran out of time last week.
      1. The question is ODULOW will deliver before May 31st.  Who from the O-DU is going to talk about that?  Is that Zhimin?
      2. Rittwik: I thought it was covered last week.
      3. Jack: They asked if they will be included in this release.  I spoke with Zhimin last night.  The issue is Intel has to go through the Intel review process to get this released. 
      4. Their target is to deliver at the end of May which does not give them time for Integration.  They wanted to put it in their software code in the repo and consider it as a part of the Bronze release.  The code would be untested and un-integrated and finish up during the maintenance window.  This is a discussion for the TOC how we want to proceed.  I had a discussion with Intel last night for improving their process for the Cherry release and adopt open source methods for their software contributions and processes.  They are going back to work those items and express that they will be able to improve them.  In terms of a vote.  The question is assuming that they contribute all the code by May 31 and our final date is June 14 do we consider that code is a part of the Bronze release?  This is a question and the approval that they seek .  It is a question for the whole TOC how they want to proceed.  The code is there and is complete and it stretches things out from how we normally do things.  
         1. Rittwik I think the code is there.  Lusheng please comment.  Are we testing the O-DU low?  There is a bilateral agreement that happened.  Even though it is not open internal pairwise testing is happening.  We set up the servers in the lab to do the testing.  Progress has been made in May.
         2. Lusheng: The Intel team stated source code in the repo is for Amber.  They didn't provide the Bronze code.  They will install the binaries in the lab there and do their pairwise testing and integration with O-DU-HIGH.  That will happen in parallel with the source code.  We are asking for the Bronze release they will put out new version of the source code for their internal process and conclude by the end of May and provide all the unit testing and testing with simulation.  They do have some testing but not integrated with other O-SC components. That was the ask.   In terms of integration building and when integration testing with ODU-HIGH currently are having some hardware issues in labs I do not have an eta due to lockdown and no access to lab.  I can not give a timeline.   If TOC consider this request from Intel it will be where to include the software in Bronze.  The code will pass the unit test for contribution.  I do not know when the integration with O-DU HIGH will happen.  ODU-HIGH integration will happen in Bronze maintenance release.
         3. Zhimin Yuan  What Lusheng and Rittwik said is clear.  For ODU-LOW project can be published by the Intel process by the end of May.  We will pass all the unit test and Layer 2 test 2 will finish unit tests internally.  If we have chance We will use the open lab if able as well.  We are asking for you to include ODU-LOW for the B release.
         4. Jack: For other TOC members are there questions?
         5. Juha: What about the licensing voting that is still ongoing and will be completed next week.  Will that effect this vote?
         6. Jack: It's being used as a test fixture.  It's not  included as part of the software contribution for O-DU LOW but it does mean that what we had to go through to make sure we are cleared to use the intel software in our test lab and recommendation of using the lab.  The community members have to decide if they are interested in the ODU path based on the Intel approach.  The approval is based on license review and everyone is aware that we are using the software.  But it is not a part of the software contribution.  It's more or less to allow us to use it for testing.  Do you still want to wait until after we get the license approval or should we vote now?
         7. Juha: If licensing is not approved then we revisit.  I wanted to understand it a little better.
         8. Zhimin: Regarding the OSC repo we will contribute the shared between O-DU High and O-DU LOW.  We will do integration testing if we are able.

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. We have a mothing to include the Intel contribution if it's made by 01 Jun 2020  to the repos.  That is the motion that Intel has made.  Vote on including O-RAN Distributed Unit Low (ODULOW) in the Bronze Release.
      1. seconded by Ganesh Shenbagaraman 
      2. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
   2. If it is not by 01 Jun 2020  or else it will not be included as a part of the Bronze release.
6. Copyright updates
   1. We covered copyright updates in the New agenda items.

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

   1. Virtual Exhibition.

      1. Jinri:  I checked the email and found that  21 May 2020  will be the deadline for WG1 in O-RAN Alliance contributions for the demo.  Contact Jinri for the virtual exhibition.  Paul Smith will organize teleconference and review submissions.
      2. That will be for the end of June virtual exhibition.
   2. OSC Logo status.

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. Action/ Farheen Cefalu add copyright updates to the agenda. (See item 6 added above)
   2. Action/ Farheen Cefaluadd link to the Virtual Exhibition site.   (Completed on 28 Apr 2020 on Events)
   3. Action/ Farheen add reviewing Bronze release highlights to the agenda (See item 9.ii added below)
      1. Issue for Bronze gets back to the marketing.  If there are companies that want to make statements as a part of Bronze release, it takes time to get them cleared internally and over to us.  We do tha through O-RAN Alliance.  Jinri is our contact for that.  I assume that they will get information to you and we will work on figuring out on the press release and we should have that on the EC meeting as well.
      2. Jinri: They have a communication.  Let's double check with Zhiminik.
      3. John-Paul Lane: Who should we contact?
      4. Jack: Send an email to Jinri and copy Jack.  Jack will get a list together and we'll go from there.  You don't need the complete list.  We want to know everybody's input for tracking purposes.
   4. Action/ Farheen Add the O-RAN-SC logo request to the marketing agenda. (See 7b above)
   5. Action/ William DIEGO update on the coordination with the O-RAN test group
      1. Jack: You heard the feedback from TSC meeting where they want to get a more coordinated view with the test group and the OTIG and other activities.  You can work with Rittwik whose been working with the simulator and anyone else interested in participating in that discussion reach out to Rittwik and William.  I know Viavi will participate.  Since they are the target I'd like Rittwik and William to organize the long term discussion.  We'll follow up on the short term discussion at the Monday EC meeting.  Is everyone OK with that? 
      2. William: Yes
      3. Rittwik: Yes
      4. Action/ William DIEGO and user-59b16 lead the effort to organize a long term discussion with Viavi about the coordinated view of the test group and their activities.

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

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

      1. Bronze Timeline

      2. Review Bronze Release Highlights

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee.

      1. Cherry release requirements gathering has started.  I have spoken to Matti, Thoralf, and the O-DU folks.  I am setting up a few meetings individually to gather requirements.  By mid-June we should be in a better position for votes.  TOC should consider what kind of themes the Cherry release will be responsible for.  We will continue traffic steering, and healthcheck use cases.  Things that have not been percolated through all components.  We have a few extra epics.  If the TOC has suggestions then let me know.  
      2. Bronze release the final integration will be done for call flows for healthcheck and traffic steering.  We have truncated some of those flows.  Lusheng understands the subflows that need to be tested.  The RSAC wiki has been updated to reflect this.
      3. Jack: I'd like to continue to see the ETE use cases evolve to drive the community to more ETE operations.  There are OAM capabilities such as healthcheck that continue to advance.  I would hope O-DU and O-CU can start those initial use cases.  I hope we can get a new use case to demonstrate more either near Real Time RIC and xAPPs and non Real Time RIC and rApps activities so we can demonstrate the work that is going on in the non Real time RIC.  I would like to make sure we are pushing the projects forward as a larger system in the general guidelines.  They should be done around useful functions like traffic steering and OAM.  If different people have different use cases then provide the input.  It is key that each release advances the overall stack and elements.  We only do two a year so it is important to push ourselves.

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

      1. Gerrit review process improvement
         1. I will table this for now.  We will start it in Cherry.
      2. Integration and testing status report
         
         1. We have a good understanding of the flows to be tested for the Bronze release.
            1. Healthcheck there are 3 use cases to be tested.
            2. Traffic use case has one
            3. O-DU will be planned out as well.
            4. T-lab has near Real time RIC.  We are getting close to making the test call flows.
            5. Integration lab O-DU test hardware installed and cards are installed but we are having hardware compatibility problems that we are looking into. As soon as they are fixed we will install Intel's O-DU Low binary code so O-DU High and Low can continue with integration testing. 

   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) 

         1. Matti: We got a two week extension for RIC App and simulator.  It looks like part of the RIC App traffic steering use case will slide into the maintenance release.  We still don't have the KPI MON from Samsung which has not been tested with the simulator we are planning the maintenance release. We also don't have legal approval.  We have a couple xApps traffic steering use cases will be tested as a part of Bronze release.
            1. Jack: How many xApps  between Bronze and Amber do we have available in open source for people to evaluate?
            2. Matti: In Bronze there are 4 xApps that are reasonably solid.  In Amber we had one xApp Admission Control that we have not upgraded to the latest E2 specs that is left over and does not apply to any of the use cases .  There is a demo Hello World xApp on using a lot of features in RIC such as E2, A1, messaging SDL.  There is a measurement campaign xApp in the Amber release that has been extended to generate more reports based on X2 messages.  We have two xApps related to traffic steering use case that are already in the repo.  Main traffic steering xApp in C++ that drives the QP driver which is pulling the data from the SDL for the ML part.  The ML app is still not in the repo but promised any day now.  It might still be testable before the end of the month.  The KPI MON is bigger because it will use the simulator that Ron just completed.  I expect there will be some bugs.  Our extended code freeze deadline passed.  I want to move this to the maintenance release. 

      3. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC) 

         1. Reviewed status on Jira items moved to Cherry.  The links are in the RIC Platform status report.
         2. Thoralf: I went through all the epics and double checked with all the teams.  Of the 65 epics planned for Bronze 36 are implemented as of yesterday.  13 have started that are in Cherry.  9 have not been started to Cherry.  8 more have been moved to backlog.  There is a link for the first phase of Cherry.  We are still planning the second phase of Cherry.  In this first phase we have a list of what will be worked on.  I don't see important dependencies on other project.  If you are curious you can find them for the status report.
         3. Jack: Two of the projects are further along then others.  OAM is also moving along pretty rapidly. We will discuss other projects next week.  The biggest question right now... 
         4. Jack: Jinri is any of the O-CU code going to start making it back to the repos soon for the 5G?
         5. Jinri: I remember contribution started 15 May 2020 for O-CU part I will double check with my colleagues .  Action/ Jinri Huang talk about the O-CU 5G contributions this week.
         6. 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. 

    1. OAI/OSA purposed Meeting
       1. OSA community had a call.  Introductions and I talked about our process.  They talked about where they are in their process.
          1. Overall they were happy with us cleaning up the issue we had with our code in our repos.
          2. They would like to talk about a strategic alliance announcement and agreement between them and the O-RAN Alliance.  I made it clear that it's an O-RAN Alliance activity.  For that particular component should come from O-RAN Alliance.  They asked about copyright use and access to the O-RAN specifications.  One way to do that is if they contribute the interfaces under a project in OSC.  Software contributions can be pulled into the integration process.  They were more interested in people working outside of OSC and maybe interested in participating.  
          3. I described the Intel model on the O-DU.  There is a license issue.  They do have some higher level code in Apache but their lower level code that is in debate follows their license which is different from our license.  There are US universities being funded by the Power project and others that are interested in using the OAI and O-RAN code in make something work.  My concern is if work takes place outside of the community that benefits, much like Intel's FAPI code that can be re-used by the community becomes more complicated.  They told me they have copyright permission from 3GPP material that allows them to generate code.  I will pass that information along to the people who are working for us.  I did not get very positive feedback from 3GPP that is what they were thinking.  I will pass along to O-RAN Alliance 3GPP.  
          4. In the end they were unable to articulate a very strong ask from us.  It is mostly from a copyright and agreement perspective.  They didn't have a plan for software contributions.  Anyone who attended feel free to add or correct. 
             1. Jinri agrees.
          5. It would be great to have more code on a lower layer but that is hard to do.  They are going to go off and think about it and get back to us.  The next steps are between them and Zbynek.  
          6. I am hoping it will turn into something more for the universities that I talked to on the Power project.  Hopefully we will get more university participation.  They don't care about patent rights and 3GPP issues they can contribute to the open project.  Hopefully we'll get more university participation.  Let Jack know if there are any other universities that will contribute.  We should look to expand.
    2. Jean-Paul: The discussion about replicating O-RAN Alliance specifications.  It was brought up as part of the TSC meeting and discussed.  Was that discussed? 
       1. Jack: The copyright aspect of it where we talked about what we can do was the operating feature. 2 votes.  Acceptance of Intel binary software for Flexran to test our approach.  Other was the copyright vote.  Board meeting coming up.  There were 2 issues with copyright approval.
          1. It stalled half way thru.  Not enough board members voted to pass it before a question came up about it.  We got some clarification and I don't know if they had to go back and reset the vote because they changed the wording slightly.  I have to find out.  Both are active.  The vote for O-RAN using Intel ends this Friday.  When I looked at it last there were +10 votes and none against last weekend.  I don't expect a problem.  It has gone into the process where I only know when it comes out.
    3. Rittwik: Can we get an update of the Viavi contract that was discussed in the EC?
       1. Jack: It was brought up as a part of the TSC and discussed. I don't control when they get to the topic.  Jinri was there for that discussion but I was not.  They didn't approve it they kicked it back for further discussion.
       2. Jinri:
          1. Regarding Intel license, the deadline will be this Friday.  Currently we all have the yes vote.  Next Monday will be the EC call for further approval.
          2. Regarding Copyright permission.  I don't have any idea regarding vote process.  Next Monday we can raise on the EC call.
          3. Regarding Viavi contract.  At the time I didn't receive confirmation from Viavi.  This is tentative.  Next Monday is the EC call we will raise this.  I have forwarded this message during the TSC call. 
             1. Jack: Did they have any particular questions...
                1. Jinri: No.They raised a another request for two collaborations.  One is short term collaboration targeted for Bronze release and the other is long term collaboration can be used with WGs, TSC, and OTIC.  For the long term solution the TSC Co chair asked us how we want to use this from OSC perspective.  for example: What software will be needed for Cherry and software for OTIC and other WGs have?  We need to combine these requirements and discuss further before presenting to Viavi.

11. Planning for Next Meeting

12. Any Other Business (AOB) 

13. 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 06 May 2020 
          2. On motion made by Juha Oravainen
          3. Seconded by user-2057e
          4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
       2. Vote on including O-RAN Distributed Unit Low (ODULOW) in the Bronze Release.
          1. On motion made by Ganesh Shenbagaraman for the O-DU LOW contribution made by 01 Jun 2020  to the repos.
          2. user-2057e seconded the motion
          3. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
    2. Actions
       1. Action/ William DIEGO update on the coordination with the O-RAN test group
       2. Action/ William DIEGO and user-59b16 lead the effort to organize a long term discussion with Viavi about the coordinated view of the test group and their activities.
       3. Action/ Jinri Huang status of the O-CU 5G contributions to repos.
       4. Action/ TOC continue last weeks review of projects.