Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

2020 07 22

Recording: GMT20200722-120257_Zoom2-O-RA_1920x1080.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
   Deutsche Telekom	David Streibl		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	x	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 15 Jul 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. Action / Farheen Cefalu add it to the top of the agenda next week.  Do we create a new project called the SMO as described by the needs of the requirements committee? 
   2. Action/ user-59b16 bring slides for the SMO project proposal.

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. John Paul Will we take a vote on the 3rd party technical charter today?
   2. No
   3. There was an ACOP meeting IPOR how soon after a spec can the spec be used?  How many days were required from when approved to when it can be used.  60 or 90 days?  There is an action has the OSC been engaged.
   4. Not engaged.  
   5. There is a question from when the working group approves there is a 3 month delay before it can be exercised.
   6. The company that owns or contributes it is their responsibility.  Once it becomes a part of the O-RAN specification it begins after board approval.  Is it 60 - 90 days after the board?
   7. Yes, after the board approves there is an 30 day delay.  This may impact on the OSC so the OSC should be involved with the conversation.
   8. Jinri: I am aware.  Which meeting are you speaking about?
      1. John Paul It was an ACOP meeting.
      2. Jinri: During the board meeting last month after the TSC submits.  Before board approves they will request the O-RAN legal review to allow companies to review their IPR status.  They will decide on options for royalties. The 60 days allows the companies to review their IPR.  After 60 days an additional 30 days to allow O-RAN to publish.  For OSC this will not impact us.  Even with the specification we can get some approval from EC for copyright.
      3. Jon Paul In he ACOP said that there may be impacts to OSC. 
      4. Jinri: There is possibly some risk here.  During the 60 days some company claims an IPR.  But what if during that period the OSC has implemented the spec with the IPR.
      5. Jack: We will continue that clarification moving forward.
6. Copyright updates

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

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. Action / Jack get the O-RAN teams perspective on Juha's concern whether Lusheng's 3rd party proposal is in line with the technical charters.
      1. Lusheng sent out an email with multiple requests.  He removed the license vote from the most recent 

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

   3. Action/ Jinri Huang send Jack and Farheen Zbynek's official O-RAN approval.
   4. Action/ Farheen Cefalu post on wiki and oran site.

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

      1. SMO for Cherry Release: Cherry SMO (with future items in rel D "Dawn" or beyond)
         1. Jack - this is a project.  Continue the OSC journey to bring enough code to bring a minimum viable product and position so that companies can take it and commercialize it.  The intent is not to make a commercial SMO for people to pull and use instead to make it functional so people can demontrate.  We should not want to fork code or duplicate code.  We want to recognize during development in case of ONAP it is hard to synchronize with upstream projects.  There will be a pull/push of code in order for people to see progress.  We are not going to name a PTL today.  We will establish a project first with a range of companies to demonstrate of pulling together an O-RAN system that shows functionality and progress.
         2. Jack: Should SMO be ONAP based or other project?  The community should decide by where and how it contributes.  We are asking for an SMO based project.  If we want to create a project that is MANO focused then let the community drive what are the options.  We are doing that in the DU LOW.  The community should decide and evolve.  For today we are talking about an SMO that is ONAP focused.  I recommend to create them as two separate projects with two PTLs.  
         3. Jinri: Currently OAM project is focused on O1 interface.  SMO is focused on O2.
         4. Jack: The Non Real time RIC is 15% of what SMO should be.  OAM is larger but combined they are far less than 50% of what the SMO is going to be.  There are catalogs and ML that can not be addressed by either OAM or NonReal time RIC.  There is a whole series of items that will be pushed into revision control that goes into Life Cycle Management (LCM).  If something else becomes a subcomponent we will consider splitting it out to allow ease of development.
         5. Rittwik: Outside of the bounds of the NONRT RIC have to be in scope of another project such as SMO.
         6. John Keeney: We need to be very clear about the scope of the overlapping projects.  We can't come to agreement of in the Alliance either.  If you look at the scope suggestions for NONRTRIC we will need to change.  We need to define what is and what is not in scope of NONRTRIC.  I would like to ask for ideas of how we clearly define the scope?
         7. Jack: The process defines that there is another side and define what that boundary.  Doing it one sided complicates.  That is why we need the SMO project to work through that discussion.  SMO will not work overnight.  We need to work the project and work down those discussions.  The truth is we need to move forward on making and demonstrating a larger working environment and figure out way to do that.   We have been discussing for three weeks.  Rittwik has brought a proposal.  We need to go through steps to get this resolved through Dawn release.  If the SMO becomes a big or small project that is yet to be determined.  The intent is not to re-create the code.  This is beyond the requirements of the integration and test team.  Without the effort of the SMO we won't get a more functional.
         8. John Keeney: If we are agreeing that there needs to have a defined scope.
         9. Jack: Having an upper level in a stack requires a defined scope.
         10. John Keeney: As long as we understand there needs to be time dedicated to scope definition negotiation.  
         11. Jack: This is a journey we've been on.  I've noticed that multiple people creating different dashboards that will require technical debt to coordinate.  That needs to be discussed.
         12. John Paul: I agree with Jack this is a journey.
         13. Gill: Should we agree where the functionality goes?  
         14. John Keeney: That should be RSAC.
         15. Jack: There may be a technical change downstream that allows you to make a decision.
         16. John Keeny: You mentioned avoiding code duplication.  How do we coordinate that?
         17. David Kinsey: you should have Jira tickets to track what is being planned.  Documenting the capabilities and features is needed in order to coordinate through jira.
         18. Jack: We don't steer what ONAP does so we may not agree with their implementation.  It has to work through the RSAC to accomplish our goals.  It needs to be better coordinated.
      2. Rittwik is proposing an SMO project for Cherry.  On motion made by Rittwik to create and SMO project with an ONAP focus at this time.  We are open to other projects in the future.
         1. Seconded by John Paul Lane
         2. Jinri Huang  abstains
         3. No negative votes
         4. John Murray  votes in favor
         5. Masafumi Masuda  votes in favor
         6. Juha Oravainen
         7. We will work offline for clarification because Ganesh Shenbagaraman dropped early and Jinri Huang wants time to think about it.

   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 15

Recording: GMT20200715-120233_Zoom2-O-RA_2108x1120.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	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 08 Jul 2020 
      2. On motion made by user-2057e
      3. Seconded by Juha Oravainen
      4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed

4. Review of Today's Agenda

   1. Farheen put SMO as an open item
   2. Rittwik requesting extending the timeline for the maintenance release.
   3. Lusheng disucss licensing attribution

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. Currently items out in email for voting.
      1. Gerrit submissions to have Jira id reference
      2. All repos to define the Nexus IQ scan for licensing.
      3. Symantec versioning.
         1. Email vote was sent on July 9 and so far we have 3 votes.
         2. Ganesh will respond with 3 votes.
6. Copyright updates
   1. Jack: We got confirmation that the copyright approval is in place.  The board gave the EC permission to approve copyright requests from OSC.  But the EC wanted clarification on how we want to structure that.  If anyone has input send it this week about items they are concerned about so I have everyones input so I can continue to work it with EC.  We cover error messages and apis and if someone has particular concerns send me a message so I can get this wrapped up.

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

   1. OSC Logo status

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

   1. Action/ Jinri Huang ask Zbynek.    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
         1. Rittwik - 2 items being tested
            1. Pipeline - simulator trace file and KPI MON are both back logged.  KPIMON is in the repo but subscription is not working correctly.  Samsung is investigation.  Viavi gave us a schema however trace file needs to be obtained.  One week extension at least or two weeks are better.
            2. Setting up lab with O-DU testing.
            3. One week is not enough for both items.  If possible two week extension.
            4. Matti - we can not guarantee we  can get it working. Subscription manager folks are on vacation this month and we will attempt but no guarantees can be made.
            5. Lusheng - Yes accurate what Rittwik described.  Everything is installed and now we can access the servers and ready to open up to Intel and Wind River for install.  It's taking longer than expected so an extension will be nice.
            6. John-Paul - It will be good to know a definite date.  Ongoing extensions we have to make a call. 
            7. Jack - The original Cherry date is July 18.  The maintenance release was July 18.  The Bronze delayed by one week.  This is a concern that we are creeping into the Cherry release development.  The Bronze maintenance release will be dead ended on August 1.  The maintenance release is scheduled for July 25th.  There is a no activity block between June 27 - 31.  We will fill up this no activity week and add an additional week to August 1.  Maintenance release from July 25 - August 1.
            8. John-Paul - Acceptable as long as we don't push into the Cherry development.
            9. Zhimin - Server can be brought up.  We need to program the server that will take time to prepare for the setup.  It is not possible to finish the O-DU Low and O-DU High by August 1.
            10. Jack - That will move out of Bronze timeline to Cherry.  How will that effect your Cherry development.
            11. Zhimin - From integration perspective we need to finish the O-DU Low and O-DU High integration.  For O-DU Low there is uncertainty.  I am not sure what is the overall impact to get into Cherry.
            12. Rittwik - My understanding was Low, High pairwise testing in Cherry.  If we could test the RU test simulator with DU low that will suffice for the bronze maintenance release. 
            13. Zhimin - We are remote programming which is causing delays.  Programming the accelerate.
            14. On motion by Rittwik to extend the maintenance release deadline to August 1 with guidance not to extend that time.
                1. seconded by John- Paul
                2. Vote taken, item passed
            15. Jack - Let's pull together these key items so we can move on to focus on Cherry.  Ganesh any concerns from your side?  The low to high integration is primarily in Cherry.
            16. Ganesh - We will work this out with Intel.
      2. CherryTimeline

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

   3. user-d3360  Integration and Test

      1. Lusheng - Originally it was brought up as an email vote that is going on.  There is discussion about this particular item.  Also from Sorav there were concerns about original licensing proposal. Sharing slides: ip-policy-20200715.pdf
         
         1. OSC License policy. some of the code is not licensed as Apache 2.  We used previously an attribution list.  We are asking TOC explicit case by case.  We are including for example MIT license as source code.  Going forward we should adopt a policy that is limiting popular and friendly licenses instead of going on a code case by case basis.  There was a misunderstanding mostly on my part of what are the popular open source license.  Creativecommons.org. has a large variety of licenses.  I am now revising this request to a shorter list.  The charters are using Apache2 for code.  Ask user-d3360 for details.
         2. Requesting TOC to vote on allowing 3rd party code use policy.
         3. Jack this is too complicated to rush to vote.  Action participating companies review your corporate legal licensing issues with your company and come back with comments.  We have time to get this resolved.  We want to clarify the use of software licenses for the development team.  Each company needs to go and do their research and come back if things on this list make sense then we need to follow a process.  Trishan and Lusheng have run it past the LF team and you are comfortable with this?
         4. Trishan, Yes.
         5. Juha - Nokia had this original proposal requires approval.  This new proposal has to be reviewed.  Is this new proposal in line with the technical charters or should the charters be updated first?
         6. Action / Jack get the O-RAN teams perspective on Juha's concern whether Lusheng's 3rd party proposal is in line with the technical charters.

   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. Do we create a new project called the SMO as described by the needs of the requirements committee?  Action / Farheen Cefalu add it to the top of the agenda next week.  
    2. Rittwik - If the need for the SMO is realized next week then can we get the group together quickly in the interest of time for the Cherry impacts.
    3. Jack - Starting a new project takes time to get over the original startup threshold.  Gathering the team getting all the repos in place.  The expectation whenever we add it will be limited.  The second release is when you start to see the team work .

11. Planning for Next Meeting

12. Any Other Business (AOB) 

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

    1. Actions
       1. Action / Farheen Cefalu add it to the top of the agenda next week.  Do we create a new project called the SMO as described by the needs of the requirements committee? 
       2. Action/ user-59b16 bring slides for the SMO project proposal.
       3. Action / Jack get the O-RAN teams perspective on Juha's concern whether Lusheng's 3rd party proposal is in line with the technical charters.
       4. Action/ Requesting TOC to vote on allowing 3rd party code use policy

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

       6. Action/ Jinri Huang send Jack and Farheen Zbynek's official O-RAN approval.
       7. Action/ Farheen Cefalu post on wiki and oran site.
    2. Votes: 
       1. On motion by Rittwik to extend the maintenance release deadline to August 1 with guidance not to extend that time.
          1. seconded by John- Paul
          2. Vote taken, item passed
       2. The minutes of the prior meetings were reviewed, and no corrections.
          1. Vote to approve minutes for 08 Jul 2020 
          2. On motion made by user-2057e
          3. Seconded by Juha Oravainen
          4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed

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