Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

2020 07 08

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

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

3. Review and Agree to Minutes of Previous Meeting 

   1. The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and no corrections.
      1. Vote to approve minutes for 01 Jul 2020 
      2. On motion made by user-2057e
      3. Seconded by Jinri Huang
      4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed

4. Review of Today's Agenda

   1. No new items

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. No votes or approvals
6. Copyright updates
   1. Jack: Jinri was the copyright policy approved by the board and ready to be posted for the OSC from O-RAN
   2. Jinri: Copyright approved by email.  Jinri didn't get a formal notification from Zbynek.  Action/ Jinri Huang ask Zybnek.
   3. Jack: Copyright issues with 3GPP with the standards focus group are still in progress.

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

   1. Bronze Release PR

      1. Press release went out after the board meeting.  Comments? 
      2. Virtual exhibition is on the website.  It is a part of the O-RAN Alliance.
      3. We need clarification there are questions about using the O-RAN logo.  Jack will get clarification at the next meeting.

   2. Virtual Exhibition

   3. OSC Logo status

      1. Action/ Farheen Cefalu update www.o-ran-sc.org site.
   4. LF Insights
      1. Action/ Farheen Cefalu We will post a link to the LF Insights in the Software page.
      2. Support can be found at support.linuxfoundation.org.

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. Action/ John Murray will check the progress of making the Virtual Exhibition being made public.
      1. Jinri - The virtual exhibition is public.  Action/ Farheen Cefalu get link to virtual exhibition from Jinri and post it on the home page of the wiki.
   2. Action/ Farheen Cefalu add a link to the LF analytics Insight on this page.

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

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

      1. Bronze Maintenance Release
         1. Rittwik: Samsung KPI MON needs to be closed out in the Maintenance release.
         2. Rittwik: Intel RU DU testing is going on.  We are cutting it close and we have dependencies that need to be finished.  Lusheng and Matti may have details.
         3. John Keeney: We have a small change in non real time RIC for the security of the A1 interface.  It is a small change and got it in a little after the release.
         4. Jack: Address closing Jira issues.
      2. CherryTimeline
         1. We have a few more weeks to close what we want to include in the Cherry release.

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

      1. Last week we were discussing the LCM call flows.  David has discussed the third E2E use case that has been documented.
      2. Having a SMO project is TBD.  That is not in the Cherry requirement.  If urgent then bring it in as a requirement for the third use case.
      3. Have a PTL for the LCM of the SMO.  Who is actually implementing the SMO?  Should we create a project?  From an implementation perspective we have to dedicate time and resources to it.  TOC should decide whether or not we need a SMO project.
      4. Jack: Are there any topics people want to bring up that are not being addressed in Cherry?
         1. Tracy: Do we want to consider the O1 specs from O-RAN a defacto requirement?  I think it would be better to formalize.  We have release 3 and release 4 is coming out in September.
         2. Jack: We have a topic on making O-1 a formal requirement across the OSC components.
         3. Rittwik: O-1, O-2 has been documented in the E2E use case.  Since O-1 is not out yet it will be pre-spec. 
         4. Tracy: Are we all set with O-1
         5. It would be nice to know with each device know which O-1.  We should show compliance and show ease of management.  
         6. Jack: What components would be an early target for that O-1 implementation?
         7. Tracy: People on this call need to discuss that.  The way to organize is to look at the O-1 specs and create a Jira ticket for 3GPP alignment management services and the project teams will figure out the impacts.  
         8. Martin: We depend on the 3GPP model.  It is not clear if we are allowed to use them in open source.  It is a license issue.
         9. Tracy: Jack I thought you mentioned that the licenses are still a work in progress.
         10. Jack: It is clear that the O-RAN board has approved the OSC to use any of the licenses used document software.  We've cleared that hurdle and will have the official answer from Zbynek.  The 3GPP ones are being worked by the standards focus group.  It is on their agenda and they don't foresee any problems.  We should have it on our goals and escalate it as a block to get it to move.  I firmly believe that O-1 and O-2 are very important interfaces.  The O-DU and O-CU components will begin support of those interfaces.  How complete they are depends on functionality.  Does anyone have any concerns
         11. Tracy made a motion to require O-1 support by all modules in OSC where relevant for software work going forward.  
             1. Seconded by Jinri Huang
             2. John-Paul will this effect the Viavi O-1 emmulators?
             3. Jack: We're trying to accomplish to get people to move forward with the release specs.  Some parts of O-1 may not be as relevant for the simulators depending on what is being tested.  Eventually the simulators will have to support all componenets
             4. Do we use the use cases to drive Cherry?
             5. Yes, those use cases should drive the parts that are relevant at each stage of the OSC.
             6. That will be broken down in the sequence diagrams.
             7. Rittwik: I think we've separated onboarding and LCM with Hello World xApp. 
             8. Jack: The use cases drive testing.  The testing and compliance in a release needs to be highlighted by the goal of the end to end use cases.  Even though we are making it a requirement what gets implemented in which release will be coupled with the use case they can be demonstrated.  This may mean to exercise each of the three sub areas to expand a use case in the use case flow so people understand what functionality we're looking at in what stage.
             9. Tracy agrees.
             10. Jack: We'll develop a score card of how we are moving against that.
             11. Vote taken item passed
      5. Jack: Moving on to SMO.  It is an entity that O-RAN doesn't want to overly specify but it contains key functions such as the non-real-time RIC which is a part of the flow.  As we move forward we need software as a tool and demonstration as a unification piece.  We need to create a SMO project to collect this functionality to pull together a functional demonstration.  The intent isn't a commercialized SMO but to pull together the basic blocks to make complete demonstration.  There are a number of items that will come forward in the space.  Is there a consensus that we need to create a working project to pull these pieces together.  The OAM project is not all of this the SMO would work with OAM. The A1, O-1, rApps, ML will need this higher entity to make some implementation decisions to know how to make this work.  Questions or thoughts?
      6. Jinri: Currently O-RAN networking group specifying SMO how can we insure that our project will not cross projects in WG2?  WG2 has the non-real-time RIC there should be a relationship between the architecture of SMO and OAM.  How can we insure there is no overlap?
      7. Jack: An implementation has to look at specifications and the implementation team will make decisions to create the functions to drive the use cases.  Use cases like Lifecycle Management (LCM) will specify.  There is a discussion of a SMO in the overall architecture.
      8. Rittwik: WG2 specifies the A-1 specs.  It is the requirement of the SMO to carry out.  In my opinion you need tangible software component.  There is a need for a SMO.  The specifications for SMO is critical.
      9. Gil: There is a gap that needs to be filled.  If there is a SMO project there needs to be an architecture role that would execute and see how that relates to the OAM project.
      10. John: We are assuming we are using ONAP which is the SMO.  We need and xApp catalog.  It is already under development.  Need for an LCM that already exists.  ML catalog is Acumos.  We need data collection which we proposed DDC function.  We need a configuration database.  We can not allow ourselves to drift into divergent functionalities of ONAP.  We've hit huge amounts of time in repairing duplication of work.  We already have an integration project.
      11. David: There can be requirements to ONAP but until you understand what is being we would have to wait for them.  There has to be a requirement that closes the gaps.  ONAP is an intended SMO.
      12. John Keeney: There are many things in ONAP but in OSC we have nothing.
      13. David:  We pick and choose.  If you want to be O-RAN compliant than there is compliance.  That will eliminate the host the code in OSC.  We want to have enough SMO to demonstrate capability.
      14. Tracy: The focus is SMO component not the SMO project.
      15. Jack: The purpose of the project is to integrate the upstream components.  How do we comply with O-RAN work when we have no influence over ONAP.
      16. John Keeney: We are the people who can influence ONAP.
      17. Jack: Same people different entities.  Our votes don't influence ONAP.  We should send the guidance to ONAP.  I don't intend to rebuild the component.  ONAP has a lot of components.  
      18. Jack: Take time to thing about it and we will bring it up as a topic next week.  Action/ Farheen Cefalu put it on the agenda.
      19. Jinri: Can we have one to two slides with the description of the problem statement with the coordination with WG1 and WG2.
      20. John-Paul: It would be clear if we can see the use cases.
      21. John Keeney: There is no point in proposing if we are already doing the work in ONAP.  
      22. Jack: This may be more of the integration project but the integration team is not big enough to handle the demand on integration.  Even if we wrote no code.  It is challenging to build functional ONAP version.  The pre-canned scripts have a lot of hard coded items to build a variant for this space.  Some of the challenges for us to talk about.  The intent is not to recreate any piece of software from any useful upstream community.  Is there another form of SMO project.  Should the project have two paths?  One ONAP based and one non ONAP based.  As a community we owe that as a discussion.
      23. Action/ user-59b16 bring slides for the SMO project proposal.

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

      1. Jack: We want to update our best practices.
      2. Lusheng: Can we move this vote to the TOC.  I sent an email
         1. Best Practices that we touched upon during the Bronze release.  
            1. Gerrit code submissions to include Jira id references.  LF will add a warning message to those that do not have a Jira id.  it is convenient to have the Jira item for the reviewer and the development management.
         2. license attribution.  TOC has been granted attribution.  They should grant for licenses for all OSC licenses.
         3. License scans.  Before each release LF helps us by scanning our repos for license violations.  That only covers Apache 2 repos not the OSC.  Who is to scan those repos.  We should id license risk asap.  Proposal is to adopt a Nexus license scan.  We only have to configure Jenkins job thanks to Chris Lott.  We need a vote to have all the repos to include this scan in all the repos.  This will catch the license risks during development instead of at the very end of the release.
         4. Symantec versioning.  We think it's necessary to have more enforcement on the versioning.  It is important to have docker images with the proper tags to do automated integrated tags.  This vote is for symantec versioning.  
         5. If there are issues please communicate via email.
         6. Thoralf: Item 1 we would like to check with Nokia legal.  Copylift and including source code modifications what license will modifications will require?  The current case by case approval.
         7. Current case by case is what license is being included and what code is included. We are using license that have been studied and declared OK by open source OSI.  We use the licenses from that safe list.  Another option is use permission for certain licenses such as MIT but not for other licenses.
         8. Thoralf: What about Apache licenses and project licenses.  There are some legal aspects that Nokia needs information on.
         9. Jack: Let us bring Thoralf's concern back to TOC and not 
      3. Jinri: Zbynek has the approved to use O-RAN copyrighted material in OSC.  OSC can use that copyrighted material.  Caution ONAP does not have that priviledge.  Downstream projects are approved for copyright.
      4. ACtion/ Jinri Huang send Jack and Farheen Zbynek's official O-RAN approval.
      5. Action/ Farheen Cefalu post on wiki and oran site.

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

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

      2. Matti Hiltunen RIC Applications (RICAPP) 

      3. Thoralf Czichy RIC Platform (RIC)

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

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

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

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

      7. Martin Skorupski Operations and Maintenance (OAM)

      8. Alex Stancu Simulations (SIM)

      9. Xiaohua Zhang Infrastructure (INF)

      10. weichen ni Documentation (DOC)

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

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

    1. user-d3360  topics to discuss

11. Planning for Next Meeting

12. Any Other Business (AOB) 

    1. Chat
       Tracy van Brakle (AT... To Everyone8:48:50 AM
       RH
       At one point in O-RAN, it was established that "SMO" is a set of deployment options
       (1) OSM-based; (2) ONAP-based; (3) Commercial product
       and that SMO componentry are a mix of mandatory and optional elements

       Zoom1 O-RAN SC To Everyone8:51:08 AM
       Correct, however to demonstrate end-to-end one must make some choices on the implementation of the SMO.
       So in O-RAN they can leave it as options, in OSC we have to make a decision.

       Tracy van Brakle (AT... To Everyone8:52:18 AM
       agree 100% but is this a project or a packaging exercise?

       Zoom1 O-RAN SC To Everyone8:54:15 AM
       We have software requirements which current platforms such as ONAP don't yet support as they have never been given the requirement.
       Therefore, there will be some minimal software to be developed to close gaps.

2020 07 01

Recording: 2020_07_01_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		Weichen Ni	x
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl		Ondřej Hudousek
   Ericsson	John-Paul Lane	x	John Keeney
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda		Anil Umesh
   Nokia	Juha Oravainen	x	Thoralf Czichy
   Orange	William Diego	x	Vincent Danno
   Radisys	Ganesh Shenbagaraman		Sachin Srivastava	x
   Verizon	Viswa Kumar		Kristen Young

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

3. Review and Agree to Minutes of Previous Meeting 

   1. The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and no corrections.
      1. Vote to approve minutes for 24 Jun 2020 
      2. On motion made by Juha Oravainen
      3. Seconded by John Paul
      4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
4. Review of Today's Agenda
5. Release Votes and Approval
6. Copyright updates
   1. Jack will get the new software specifications posted on the site.  The board had a meeting and approved.  The leadership was supportive and excited about the progress.  Virtual exhibition has some nice demos.
   1. 1. 1. John-Paul are there plans to make the Virtual Exhibition publicly accessible.
         2. Action/ John Murray will check the progress of making the Virtual Exhibition being made public. 
      2. Action/ Farheen Cefalu add a link to the LF analytics Insight on this page.

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

      1. Bronze Release PR

      2. Virtual Exhibition.

      3. OSC Logo status.

   3. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

      1. Action / user-d3360 add the topic of license attributions to the agenda.  We want to start the pairwise testing.
      2. Action/ John Murray get clarification regarding transfer of AT&T Apache code into the new dual license repo
         1. Apache can be copy forward but we do not remove the Apache license.  We will move that to an inactive status and the Samsung contributions will be in the new license repo.

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

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

         1. Releases Cherry Release Planning

            1. We should be in the epic and what are the main end to end use cases.  

      2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

         1. Sharing spreadsheet.
            1. OCU Epics.  These are the things we will do with O-CU.  WG8 epics for Cherry.  No Bronze pairwise testing with O-CU.  Still pairwise testing with O-CU High.
            2. OTF Epics. Planning resources for OTF. 
               1. Eliza some epics are lower priority for Cherry.  Also the deployment of xApps and rApps.  That is not here.  Eliza Celenti is coming up with a plan.  
               2. Rittwik will catch up David about call flow.
               3. David Kinsey  yes, we have to establish a timeline and xApp deployment.  We came up with a simple approach of a flow.  We want O-SC to have a Cherry requirement.  This will validate O2.  The app should be able to join with the RIC.
               4. user-59b16  will that touch non RTU RIC?
                  1. David Kinsey not really.  You will have a piece of the SMO and xApp.  The non RT RIC is aware ahead of time and doesn't use A1 to discover.  We should have a discussion but may not be able to form epics.
               5. Non RT RIC is a requirement study.  
                  1. You have to have some software.  Parts are at risk and others are not.  SDK will not be at risk.  The thing in the SMO that would manage the LCM would be at risk.  We are proposing it can be applied to MANO or ONAP but it would have to be downstream to provide real value.
                  2. ACiton/ David Kinsey set up a meeting with Martin Skorupski to continue discussion.
            3. INF Epics
               1. StarlingX is the commercial apps.  Which part is commercialized?  I think StarlingX is what is being commercialized.  What we have with OSC is a derivative of that.
            4. NRT RIC has a lot of epics.  The epics come down to many things.  Some of it may happen in Cherry and some may not.  There is a priority list of High, medium, low.
               1. The PTL and the people need to manage their epics.  The key is to have the E2E use cases working.
               2. The ETE flows have not chained.  There were four health check flows. 
               3. We need to have a checklist of where we are with the end to end flows.  They are complex.  It is important that you give organization for each use case of where we are in the progress of that use check.
            5. We had a discussion on O-DU High on flows but because of resources and time we have to have a prioritized, stretched, and agressive plan to demonstrate significant progress to the overall flow.
            6. ODU-Low epics
            7. Simulator E2 simulator enhancements.  
            8. Traffic Steering xApp Bronze - Viavi decided to contribute access to some of their tools.  Add it to the agenda.  Be sure everyone understands what's available from the simulator. 
            9. What are the major advances that are significant to the E2E use cases.
               1. Get the pipeline working.  For Cherry it is ambitious to get the KPI-MON thru the xApp.  
               2. Mentality how do you get the data just in time and target a UE.  That's the E2E healthcheck validation.  See RSAC Cherry Release presentation.
               3. E2 service model may not be fully complete before sprint development starts.  This is pre-spec. so it will be a challenge.
            10. Healthcheck - The healthcheck flows will not change.  Components will have to adhere.  near RT RIC has not completed their flows.  It is up to the PTLs to take a look.  We need a score card or else we wont know where people are at.
            11. LCM - David is coming up with call flows.
            12. Jack - Does anyone want to add items to our E2E use case.  How do we show A1 functionality?  How do we demonstrate more of the A1 controller as part of the E2E use cases?
                1. John-Paul Is there something required for OR-Apps?
                2. Jack How do we pull cases together like rApps and getting the SDK in place and get rApps.  We have the pieces but to pull it all together we need to create 2 projects.  1 for SMO and who wants to contribute a model.  I want to open up a discussion to create an SMO project and elect a PTL to make an overall system gradually.  I do want people to think about it and who would want to participate in organizing it.  We need to start and manage contributions to it to get to the point of getting rApps in place.
                3. John-Paul If we had an ORApp.
                4. There is a Hello World that can be either rApp or OApp.
                5. We can list some of the code for the R1 interface.
                6. These need to go into more depth in the RSAC.  We can summarize here but the details.
                7. I am getting interest in O-DU Low project.  The question is how best to manage that.  I thought the most effective way is to treat them in parallel.  We can see how much code can be used across them.  There is interest and people will be joining in the next few weeks to discuss.
                8. Rittwik - I will update the spreadsheet.  When the planning is done it is up to the PTLs to run with it.
                9. Jack - The challenge in Cherry is to develop technology adding the O-1 interface and become more of a functional subsystem.  We will get O-CU code that will start to fill out those blocks.  Just because people are active in xApps we don't want to lose the focus of developing all the parts of the stack.  Each component should advance a certain amount in that release in coming up with an O-RAN system.
                10. PTLs think about advancing their modules and making it interoerable with the E2E flows.  We must make it a useful system where people can grab parts of the code and move the whole O-RAN community forward.  Try to make as much re-usable for the community as they leverage those products.  We've gotten through 2 releases and declared the paths we're on.  We have to listen to the larger community and grow participation of people using and contributing the code.  This will only happen if people and companys participate.  
                11. Think of how we can improve Cherry.  Look for ideas of how to improve how we work.  We need to grow and round out.  This is a group of small teams.  O-RAN Alliance is over 200 members we have to get more people to participate.  It is a project for wider participation including service providers not just generating specs but dealing with ramifications of using those specs.

      3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

         1. user-d3360  discuss general practice.
         2. user-d3360  Getting Started

      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)

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

1. Discuss SMO 

1. 1. is Planning for Next Meeting

   2. Any Other Business (AOB) 

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

   1. Votes
      1. The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and no corrections.
         1. Vote to approve minutes for 24 Jun 2020 
         2. On motion made by Juha Oravainen
         3. Seconded by John Paul
         4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
   2. Actions
      1. Action/ John Murray will check the progress of making the Virtual Exhibition being made public.
      2. Action/ Farheen Cefalu add a link to the LF analytics Insight on this page.

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