Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

2020 07 15

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
   Ericsson	John-Paul Lane		John Keeney
   NTT DOCOMO	Masafumi Masuda		Anil Umesh
   Nokia	Juha Oravainen		Thoralf Czichy
   Orange	William Diego		Vincent Danno
   Radisys	Ganesh Shenbagaraman		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 

4. Review of Today's Agenda

5. Release Votes and Approval

6. Copyright updates

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

   1. Bronze Release PR

   2. Virtual Exhibition

   3. OSC Logo status

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. Action/ Jinri Huang ask Zybnek.  Jinri didn't get a formal notification from Zbynek regarding copyright policy approval by the board.

   2. Action/ Jinri Huang send Jack and Farheen Zbynek's official O-RAN approval.
   3. Action/ Farheen Cefalu post on wiki and oran site.
   4. Action/ Farheen Cefalu update www.o-ran-sc.org site with Bronze Press Release .
   5. Action/ Farheen Cefalu We will post a link to the LF Insights in the Software page.
   6. Action/ Farheen Cefalu get link to virtual exhibition from Jinri and post it on the home page of the wiki.
   7. Action/ Farheen Cefalu put SMO discussion on the agenda.
   8. Action/ user-59b16 bring slides for the SMO project proposal.

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

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

      1. Bronze Maintenance Release
      2. CherryTimeline

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

   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. 

11. Planning for Next Meeting

12. Any Other Business (AOB) 

13. Meeting Summary (resolutions, new action items, etc.

2020 07 08

Recording: 2020-07-08_toc.m4a (audio only)

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 think 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.

13. Meeting Summary

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