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Community Highlights – October 2021

Nov 4, 2021
Ain Indermitte
Ain Indermitte About the author

We want to take a moment to highlight people and contributions that are making a substantial difference across our amazing communities. 

Table of Contents 

Aether
SD-RAN
SD-Core
SD-Fabric
SEBA/VOLTHA
P4
PINS
Stratum
ONOS
OIMT
OTCC
Developer Relations & Communities

Aether 

  • Prateek, Amit, and Pushp from GS Lab have been working on adding metrics to the Aether portal, including enforcing security policies for metrics.
  • Application filtering has been added to the Aether ROC.
  • Slice and Application QoS have been added to the Aether ROC.
  • The Aether ROC can now use Keycloak as an authentication mechanism.
  • Stability has been improved within onos-config, a key component of the Aether ROC.
  • Aether 1.5.2 RC is now deployed on ONF production infrastructure.
  • Many additional system tests have been added to Aether.
  • ONF’s Menlo Lab now includes a deployment of three small cells as well as three slices.
  • Traffic analysis now includes an alarm feature.
  • ONF has begun research into chatbots to be used for natural language processing on the Aether portal.
  • ONF is developing an AI/ML video processing application using OpenVINO, deployed at ONF’s Menlo Lab.
  • ONF is working on automating eNodeB configuration.

SD-RAN

  • Deutsche Telekom has deployed the first fully disaggregated 5G field trial, interconnecting components from over 8 vendors with ONF’s SD-RAN open source RAN Intelligent Controller (nRT-RIC). 
    • As the first full implementation of the O-RAN architecture with RU, DU, CU, RIC, and xApps from a suite of different suppliers, this represents a milestone in the open RAN movement.
    • This event was the first opportunity for the public to hear about the challenges and triumphs of the deployment, gain insight into what is possible with today’s open technologies, and discuss details with the principles in charge of the deployment.
    • Event videos, including keynotes, panels, and talks from the ecosystem can be found here.
  • We released SD-RAN 1.3 with updated versions of our micro-ONOS based nRT-RIC, xApp-SDKs, new xApps, whitebox LTE CU/DU/RU solution, and sdRan-in-a-Box (RiaB).
    • The highlights of this release include two new use case implementations - xApp based Mobile Handovers and RAN Slice Management - as well as the ability to run multiple instances of the E2T microservice for HA and horizontal scalability.
    • As before, we also continue to upgrade the RIC platform to the latest O-RAN specifications  -  this release includes E2 AP 2.0 support while maintaining support for the previous version 1.01.
    • Read more about it in the release notes on the SD-RAN documentation site (ONF member-only access).

SD-Core

  • Sai from the Intel team and Anjana from the Infosys team are working on supporting multiple control plane connections in UPF.
  • Badhrinath from ONF has worked on REST APIs to configure BESS UPF. This work is complete and code is available.   
  • Shubham Joshi from GS Lab is  working on 5G network function profiling work. 
  • ONF and GS Lab team developing gNodeB simulator for 5G development. Vini Gajjar from GS Lab and Ajay Thakur from ONF working on this tool. First version of this simulator is available in SD-Core release helm charts now. The tool now supports Registration, UE Initiated Deregistration, and PDU Session Establishment simulation profiles along with the data plane (uplink and downlink ICMP ping packets).
  • Ruchit from GS Lab team has worked extensively to improve test coverage in SD-Core. Recently we added test cases around QoS.
  • The ONF team has completed Application filtering work and support is available as SD-Core 1.0 development is complete.  As a part of this work, now SD-Core supports multiple FARs, QERs, PDRs per UE. This will give critical features of binding applications to specific slices. Users outside the slice should not be able to access the applications. This code is available and now going through release cycle tests. 
  • ONF team members fixed issues observed in Network Slice Configuration (addition, deletion, and modification). We also fixed issues seen in Device Group Configuration (addition, deletion, and modification).
  • The SD-Core team continues to support various trial efforts.  A number of ONF member companies are using SD-Core in their trials. There were some issues observed during the trial in AMF and SMF. Ankur and Vijaya from the ONF team have fixed the production issues. This makes AMF and SMF more stable.
  • The ONF team upgraded the Aether network with the latest Aether 1.5 Release code. Complete 4G/5G  Network Functions are configured through ROC network slicing APIs. This is a unique feature of SD-Core and available to ONF member.

SD-Fabric

  • SD-Fabric v1.0 is released! SD-Fabric provides developers with a friendly, cloud-managed, full stack, P4 programmable network fabric enabling a new class of emerging edge applications for Industry 4.0. Please read this blog post to learn more about this release.
  • SD-Fabric team plans to show two demos at OCP Global Summit. We look forward to seeing you at the in-person event!
  • Max and Darius (ONF) contributed new test infrastructure for performance evaluation between P4-UPF and BESS-UPF.
  • Emanuele (ONF) started porting v1model fabric pipeline to fabric-tna repo. He also helped setting up Jenkins pipeline to run the new tests in parallel.
  • Wailok (ONF) cleaned up the slicing service API and is planning for dynamic queue configuration support.
  • Jon (Ciena) and Siddesh (ONF) contributed to various test improvements, including a consolidated test result dashboard and SRRouting test cases. 

SEBA/VOLTHA

  • Completed the move from Kafka to gRPC migration for internal container-to-container communication, improving performance, stability, and greatly simplifying the system. All tests are now passing, with higher speed and simpler interaction. Thanks to Ciena, in particular to Khen and David, ADTRAN with Holger, Michael, and Torsten, and ONF’s Matteo, Girish, and Andrea. 
  • Completed the last elements for PM and Alarms with the capability to reset counters, thanks to Himani from Ciena. 
  • Merged initial patches to support Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) thanks to Netsia, Mahir and Ozge in particular. 
  • Included new MEs and Relaxed decoding from omci-lib-go, to allow for vendor specific elements, thanks to Chip at Tibit and Michael at ADTRAN.
  • Further checks included for ETCD date after a device delete, ensuring a complete cleanup, thanks to Serkant from Netisa, Hardik and Girish from ONF. 
  • Completed the Test suite for image download and reconciliation, thanks to Torsten at ADTRAN and Hardik at ONF. 
  • Completed the move to BAL 3.10, thanks to Dave and Frank from Broadcom, Burak at Netsia, and Girish from ONF. 
  • VOLTHA was also present, through Andrea Campanella, at BBWF, where a talk and a panel were held, with great discussion and face to face meetings, if you want to learn more please check this blog post. 
  • Several bug fixes on master and 2.8, a huge thanks to all the community on these.

P4

  • Results of the 2021 P4 TST Elections were announced. JK Lee (Intel), Noa Zilberman (Oxford University), and Steffen Smolka (Google) have been elected to a 2-year term. A thanks to the outgoing TST members for their contributions: Nate Foster, Amin Vahdat, and Stefan Heule. Read the blog to learn more about the incoming TST members and what they hope to accomplish as part of this team. 
  • The 4th P4 Workshop in Europe will be taking place as a virtual event on December 13th, 2021, so mark your calendars! The event is being hosted by ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communication System (ANCS’21).
  • P4 API Working Group - Highlights from Meeting October 29th (link to meeting minutes)
    • Community updates
      • Intel launched https://ipdk.io.
      • Keysight support for line-rate P4 device testing.
    • Discussion
      • P4Info verification on the server-side for fixed-function pipelines.
      • P4 modeling for SAI.
      • State of simulator support for PSA.
      • Addition of a new field to P4Info for ActionSelectors (proposal).
  • P4 Language Design Working Group - Highlights from Meeting October 4th (link to meeting minutes)

PINS 

  • The PINS MVP was open sourced and contributed to upstream SONiC for inclusion in the SONiC 202111 release. Thanks to Akarsh Gupta, Ashish Singh, Atman Mehta, Bhagat Janarthanan, Glenn Connery, Howard Yang, Jay Hu, Jonathan Dilorenzo, Konstantin Weitz, Manali Kumar, Mike Attig, Richard Yu, Robert Halstead, Robert J. Halstead, Runming Wu, Srikishen Pondicherry Shanmugam, Stefan Heule, Steffen Smolka, Stephen Wang, Tianyu Xia, Vivek Ramamoorthy, Yilan Ji (Google), Brian O'Connor, Daniele Moro, and Don Newton (ONF) for your code contributions!
  • The upstream SONiC contributions have been reviewed by Guohan Lu, Prince Sunny, Yanzhao Zhang (Microsoft), Sagar Balani, Ravi Vantipalli, Volodymyr Boiko (Intel), and many others in the SONiC community. Thanks for your feedback!

Stratum 

  • Brian O’Connor and Max Pudelko (ONF) released Stratum 21.10, which is also part of the SD-Fabric 1.0 release. Pre-built Docker images and Debian packages, along with a more extensive change list, can be accessed on the Stratum 2021-10-09 release page.
  • Brian added LICENSE and NOTICE files to all Stratum binary distributions. Users can find the license that applies to each Stratum target in /usr/share/doc/stratum-<target name> after installing the Stratum package.
  • Rich Renner (Sunder Networks) fixed a bug when initializing the gRPC server with TLS certificates.

ONOS

  • David Glantz (Windstream) improved the FlowRuleIntentInstaller to reinstall flow rules when they are missing in the FlowRuleStore and improved the logging messages when an intent compilation fails. Moreover, he contributed a new API for the FlowRuleService.
  • Miguel Borges de Freitas (Altice Labs) improved the OF southbound to save the dp_desc as a device annotation and make it available to the northbound apps. Fixed an issue in the ovsdb connections established in passive modes and improved P4RT write requests to return an error when a codec failure happens.
  • Anurag Chadha (HSC) fixed an issue that was preventing the update of the applications through ISSU.
  • Niraj Dubey (Samsung) added the support for json output in the PortStatsCommand and contributed BGP monitoring APIs. 
  • Pier (ONF) fixed an issue in the GeneralDeviceProvider that was causing device disconnection when an ONOS instance rejoins the cluster.
  • Pier (ONF) and Sean (ONF) improved GUI/GUI2 by improving the support of device ports with names both in the topology view and in the traffic highlights and fixed an issue that was preventing the TrafficMonitor shutdown.
  • Pier (ONF) and Andrea (ONF) fixed NPEs respectively in the HostService and in the APPs REST APIs.

OIMT

  • Publication of the ONF TR-512 “Core Information Model” v1.5 release. The TR-512 v1.5 release documents (including a suite of thirty model description documents) and UML model files (including the XMI codes) are open source. It is contained in three zip files currently available publicly on the ONF open git repository https://github.com/OpenNetworkingFoundation/CoreInfoModel, and will also be published shortly on the publicly available ONF web site https://www.opennetworking.org/software-defined-standards/models-apis/ under the “PROJECT: INFORMATION MODELING” tab.
    • Chief editor Nigel Davis (Ciena) and Co-editor Kam Lam (FiberHome).
    • Major updates from v1.4 to v1.5
      • New TR-512.13 “Party Model” (Key contributor: Chris Hartley – Cisco).
      • New TR-512.14 “Location Model) (Key contributor: Chris Hartley – Cisco).
      • TR-512.17 “Foundation – State” split from TR-512.3 (Key contributor: Malcomb Betts – ZTE).
      • Significant improvement to the model structure so the UML model is aligned with the documents.
    • Use of the following version of the modeling tool: Eclipse 4.13.0 (2019-09) and Papyrus 4.5.0.
  • Liaison statement to ITU-T Study Group 15 and MEF to inform the publication of ONF TR-512 v1.5 release and appreciate the close collaboration with them in the development of the TR-512 CoreModel and would like to thank ITU-T SG15 and MEF again for their continuous valuable input and the active participation of many individual experts in the ONF OIMT, OTCC TAPI, TSIM and IISOMI discussions.

OTCC

  • The 5G-xHaul subproject under Thorsten Heinze (Telefonica) has been working on the definition of Microwave(and-related-interface and profiles)-conditional-packages to the ONF CoreModel and this work has now moved from proof-of-concept into production.  According to the main lead Martin Skorupski (Highstreet) there are now on the order of 40K devices from at least 3 different vendors that have incorporated the model defined by the 5G-xHaul team.  Thanks also to Andreas Lattoch and Eduardo Yusta Padilla (both of Telefonica) and Alfons Mittermaier (Highstreet).

Developer Relations and Communities

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ain Indermitte
Ain IndermitteHead of Developer Relations
Ain's extensive career in the developer relations, program management, mobile software, enterprise SaaS, and telecommunications disciplines spans Nokia, Microsoft, MobileIron, and ServiceNow. He has worked in Estonia, Finland, California, and Texas, and has traveled considerably around the globe for business. Ain is currently serving as Head of Developer Relations at the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), focusing on community leadership, developer tools, training, and member engagement - with the goal of transforming the telecommunications industry through the adoption of software defined networking and open source software. Ain is married with five children and a dog. During his free time, he likes to hike or bike to beautiful places and fly his drones.

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