Technical Charter for O-RAN Software Community

2020 07 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	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		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. Vote to approve minutes for 22 Jul 2020 

   2. On motion made by Jinri Huang
   3. Seconded by Juha Oravainen
   4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed

4. Review of Today's Agenda

   1. We will continue about the SMO and the voting.
   2. Review the maintenance release and schedule.
   3. Discuss Minute taking and scribe.  We have to rotate among the TOC members.
   4. Discussion on Cherry

5. Release Votes and Approval

   1. SMO Vote: Jack: Last week a few people dropped early.  We got 4 in favor 1 abstaining 1 against.  We need to get to 5 votes across TOC even though we had majority present I want to make sure the TOC takes time to work through it and get approval.  We have a standing motion on creating an SMO project brought by Rittwik on the RSAC committee.  Are there further clarifications.
      1. AT&T, Ericsson, NTT DOCOMO, and Nokia voted in favor.  Jinri abstained.
      2. Jinri: I would like to change my vote to Yes.
      3. William from Orange votes in favor.
         1. Vote to add the SMO project to O-RAN SC.
         2. On motion made by user-59b16
         3. Seconded by John-Paul Lane
         4. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
      4. Jack: We need to add the SMO to wiki and create a repo in gerrit. Action/ Trishan de Lanerolle add the SMO project to the wiki and gerrit.  
      5. Jack: We will need a PTL.  Looking for people to take on a role as a PTL for the new SMO project.  We should be following Best Practices.  As an interested party anyone can contribute to the project.  Requires an LF ID.  We prefer you use your company's email.  If you want to take a more active role you can offer to be a committer.  There are a small number of committers per project, minimum 2, maximum 5.  The PTL can also be a committer.
      6. You also have to sign the CLA agreement for licensing.  There are two different licenses
         1. Apache license
         2. O-RAN license
         3. For SMO we expect contributions under the Apache license.  We are not under the 3GPP interfaces.  One of the questions asked by EC.  For RIC Near RT controller we have separate applications.  We are going to try to capture these applications as SMO applications and continue to see if that works or we need to separate.  R-Apps under the SMO projects.  We will create a structure that clearly identifies the people.
      7. Action/ user-59b16 start the Principles we will kick the wiki off with these principles.  The RSAC has proposed minimum viable product.  Looking at O-RAN Alliance working groups specifications.  If we don't find specs there then we try to work with them towards the specification so we are not creating throw away code.
   2. Lusheng: Email voting request was sent to the ML on July 9th.  The vote if for 3 procedures and best practices. 
      1. All gerrit code submissions to include at least 1 Jira issue.  This is for tracking purposes.  This creates a Link between gerrit submissions and Jira issues.  
         1. We currently have 3 votes.  Who wants to vote in favor?
         2. Jinri: I thought I already cast my vote via email.  I vote yes.
         3. Jack: I vote yes.
         4. That brings us to 5 votes. 
         5. VOTE: Vote taken, item passed
         6. Lusheng get clarification from LF how to list multiple issue IDs to gerrit. 
         7. Will this be a gerrit pre-check?
         8. Yes, the system will return with a warning message.
      2. License scans are not done until one or two weeks prior to a release.  We require more time.  LF does not scan SCP repos.  That leaves those repos open. LF does have a tool called nexus iq.  People have been using that to do license scans.  Because of the language the security vulnerability may not be helpful for Java but for Go C++ is not as helpful.  Requesting all the repos to add this nexus iq job.  Action item for repo owners is to define a job.  There are samples available for you to follow.Any questions?
      3. 1. On motion made by Lusheng to include a license scan to all repos.
         2. Jinri approves.
         3. Vote taken item passed
      4. Adopting symantec versioning for the artifacts (libraries and docker images and use it for the artifacts).  Teh action item is for the developers and contributors in the future please use major, minor, and patch versioning.  We can write some best practices in the future but this is the format.  Another action item is what will be the best way to verify a version.
         1. On motion made by Lusheng to include a license scan to all repos.
         2. Jinri approves.
         3. Vote taken item passed
6. Copyright updates
   1. No updates on copyrights
   2. Jinri: Zbynek sent an official copyright notification to us. 
   3. Jack: We have an action item that we have to make a proposal to the EC with Stefan but that is still in process.
   4. John-Paul: Is this the 60 day impacts?
   5. Jack: No we were talking about the copyright permission from O-RAN Alliance on any copyrighted material.  The 60 day gets approved by us and we're refining the language for that feature.  That is an alliance issue when the material can be managed copyright material.
   6. John-Paul: Is that resolved?
   7. Jack: Has the 60 day copyright IPR issues resolved?
   8. Action/ Jinri Huang  will check with Zbynek of whether this will imapact. 

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

8. Status of Open Action Items (Old Business)

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. August 1st is the close out date.  I will look to Lusheng to give us a report but I think the progress is less than hoped for in a few areas. 
         2. Lusheng: Status: we have a couple deliverables planned. 
            1. O-DU Low running in the OSC integration lab and completing the O-DU high.  This is lagging behind.  We've been having system related issues. We had 2 dell servers.  For some reason the NIC and FPGA cards do not work right on these two servers.  Later we got the wolf pass servers.  We're having problems installing OS on this server.  It will not make it to this weekend.
         3. KPI-MON xApp flow the near real time xApp team have been trying to build the docker image with other xApps to complete this flow.  There were some problems with the routing. 
            1. Matti: The subscription manager is rejecting the request.  I reached out to the team but have not gotten the response.  The internal communication is working but given the time I am not sure we will deliver.
         4. Additional minor improvements in documentation and the integration repo to upload demo scripts for people to run the demo.
         5. Rittwik: O-DU High is ready to integrate with O-DU Low.  
         6. Lusheng: The O-DU High can follow the future enhancement to move feature code in Bronze release, update their release notes.
         7. John Keeney  We don't see the verification jobs when we release.  I assume there will be full integration tests. I want to know if we can help.
         8. Lusheng; The issue is the base image that your docker file requires has expired on the staging docker registry.  We need to generate that first. 
         9. Henrik Anderson: Will the staging jobs be ready?
         10. Lusheng: The LF has two registrys STAGING and RELEASE.  If it's in the staging registry it will live there for 30 days. Jenkins has a job that will regenerate the newest version of the base image. That image gets refreshed.  It will exist in the staging repo.  The build reference is to the previous version of the base image.  We need to figure out to regenerate.  
         11. Henrik: When we push things to the Bronze branch they don't exist in the staging repo.
         12. Lusheng: Let's work offline.
         13. Jack: We are looking for people who will be interested in Integration and Test.  Lusheng will be reducing his time.  We need more participation in the integration and test area beyond their project.  We need coordination work to have a few more people involved.  
      2. CherryTimeline

   2. user-59b16 Requirements Software Architecture Committee

      1. Rittwik: EC has reqested a requirements document for the RAN simulator.  That allows us to socialized with the EC and TOC for bidding for a RAN simulator.
      2. Jack: Any PTL who wants to leverage the simulator beyond planning and generating data should communicate to your their requests and requirements.  Anyone who has needs in that space reach out to user-59b16 for the Cherry release.  Since there is a cost associated we want to make sure we're getting everyone's input.
      3. Are all the use cases finalized for Cherry?
      4. Rittwik: Yes, they are in the wiki and lifecycle management for the SMO and the traffic steering and health-check use cases.
      5. Matti: I have new teams that want to contribute to xApps.  I will reach out to you.

   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 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 votes in favor
         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.

    1. Actions
       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.
       2. Action/ Jinri Huang send Jack and Farheen Zbynek's official O-RAN approval.
       3. Action/ Farheen Cefalu post on wiki and oran site.
    2. Votes
       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
       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 votes in favor
          7. We will work offline for clarification because Ganesh Shenbagaraman dropped early and Jinri Huang wants time to think about it.

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