ONF Community Highlights April 2019

We want to take a moment to highlight some of those contributions (and the people) that are making a substantial difference across our amazing communities.

Certification Brigade

• The Certification brigade released its first set of switch verification test cases.  Currently the switch verification team is working on operational level tests for the fabric switch.  Test cases were put together by Andrey Laschev, Roman and Sreeju Sreedhar.
• Claudio Serra is working with China CORD alliance to engage them into brigade work.
• Claudio Serra, Sreeju Sreedhar and Suchitra Vemuri had an initial discussion to kick off OLT component verification.  
• Also, there was a discussion with Lincoln Lavoie, Christopher Brown, Daniel Moss who are part of UNH IOL BroadBand access team along with Timothy Winters from UNH IOL to start OLT certification activities.  There will be an official announcement regarding the same from the brigade team.

COMAC

• Run mobile core network on multiple cluster kubernetes, the clusters can be located at multiple different countries. In ONS 2019, we setup two clusters, the first one runs the 3GPP control plane in ONF in Menlo Park, the second cluster which runs the 3GPP data plane is located at San Jose convention center.
• With Infosys team, we Integrated the distributed CDN cache across clusters. When a user watches a video in the local mobile edge cluster, the video can play immediately. If the user watches a video from the remote cluster, the video has an obvious delay. This shows the benefit of running services at mobile edge. With this use case, we proved one of the benefits of COMAC: low latency for mobile edge service.
• ONF team visited China Unicom Lab in Beijing and we were shown the physical POD of M-CORD deployment in the Lab.

Config

• µONOS work is starting to take off with initial focus on the base configuration subsystem.
• Currently, the core team is comprised of Jordan Halterman, Andrea Campanella, Ray Milkey, Sean Condon and Thomas Vachuska.
• Adib Rastegarnia from Purdue will also be joining in the effort over the next several months.
• Community members are encouraged to join the discussion on the mailing list and in the TST forums.
• The µONOS-config started a repo under github here: https://github.com/opennetworkinglab/onos-config
• Work has started on a device simulator for openconfig, some of the core components for the configuration storage and operations and a southbound gNMI client plugin.

CORD Platform

• Added operations to XOS to backup and restore its database.
• Completed the process of simplifying how XOS containers are built.  Released delayered, Alpine-based container images for all XOS services and updated the Helm charts to reference the new images.
• Created and released a ‘testservice’ for exercising XOS’s service synchronizer framework.
• Added xproto linting to check for correct syntax and consistent use of options.

ODTN

• Open Source NETCONF + OpenConfig simulator  thanks to Boyuan Yan
• Proposal for Input Power extension to Openconfig
• Completed definition gNPY integration thanks to Politecnico of Turin Vittorio Curri, Juniper, Kevan jones and Gert Grammel and Cisco, Gabriele Galimberti
• Initial work on automated bidirectional intents thanks to Alessio Giorgetti and Ramon Casellas
• Onboarded Vishnu K from Sterlite

• Enhanced STC testing thanks to Boyuan Yan

OIMT (Open Information Modeling & Tooling)

• Explored on modeling of Template/Profile aiming to meet the operator needs with input from Telefonica. Try to work out the model pattern so that all cases can be supported by a common base Template/Profile model
• Explored on model simplification for the physical model of connector/pin/strand. Options of the physical cable network are being examined with instance level comparison. Insight learned from the TM Forum outside plant model was also looked.
• Have been preparing the agenda plan and input material for the upcoming OIMT & OTCC Joint Interim Meeting in Beijing on May 6 -10, 2019, hosted by China Mobile and FiberHome. There will be a whole day tutorial on the ONF TR-512 Core Model and TAPI Model. Remote participation will be available to benefit those who cannot attend the meeting in person.

OMEC

• Added AVX support for i40e dpdk-18.02 driver.
• Add veth + AF_PACKET DPDK vdev support to leverage kernel control plane.
• Refactored the install.sh in ngic-rtc project.
• Added lots of improvements to the OMEC projects such as indicate parameters --s5s8_<s/p>gwu_<ip/port> as optional in INSTALL.MD, compile libgtpv2c as a static library, and print stack trace on segfault.
• The current EPC is based on 3GPP release 13. During the workshop in April in Beijing with China Unicom and Chinese CORD alliance community. Lots of people from the community wish we can start release 15/5G core.

ONF Developer Relations (DevRel)

• The DevRel team is Andrea Campanella, Bill Snow, Brian O’Connor, Charles Chan.
• ONF published the first two community member highlights in April - Jayakumar and Somnath.
• We continue to work with Bitergia to bring a better metrics dashboard to ONF. Matteo Scandolo is leading that effort. If you like metrics and want to help out let us know.
• Thank you to Lou Donofrio (Trellis - Comcast), Julie Lorentzen (VOLTHA - AT&T), Alessio Giorgetti (ODTN - Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna) who offered to help with monthly highlights in their communities.
• We are starting to discuss who is the right person to hire for our DevRel leader. That person would focus on the health of all the ONF communities. Next we will put together a job description - once we have it we will share it. If you have any suggestions for someone who might fit the role send a note to bill@opennetworking.org.

ONOS

• Nikolai Merinov from inango systems presented a proposal for better packet-in queue handling in ONOS. The packet processing chain will be split along several priority queues along with packet classifiers to determine the destination queue for each packet. Code review for this enhancement is currently in process for version 1.12 LTS, but will also be ported to ONOS 1.15 LTS and ONOS 2.2.
• ONOS 2.1 (Raven) has released on April 29th. Release review and planning for the next release (Sxxxx) was done on May 3rd.
• GUI 2 (based on Angular v7) is now the default GUI application. The original GUI application is still available for those users that have applications that have not yet been ported to the new GUI.

OTCC (Open Transport Config & Control)

• Karthik Sethuraman (NEC) supervised the completion of TAPI 2.2 Release Candidate 1 on April 8th.  TAPI 2.2 will incorporate extensions to the Photonic Media and OAM models as well as a new Equipment model.  Thanks especially to Arturo Mayoral (Telefonica), Stephane St. Laurent (Infinera), Andrea Campanella (ONF), Andrea Mazzini (Nokia) and Nigel Davis (Ciena) for their extension work.  Completion of TAPI 2.2 is targeted for early June.
• The Wireless Transport subgroup under Giorgio Cazzaniga of SIAE completed an update to the Microwave Information Model (Thorsten Heinze, Telefonica, ed) and this has been posted to the ONF website as TR-532v1.1.

P4/Stratum

• ONF, with the help of the Stratum community, presented a “Next-Gen SDN” demo at ONS 2019, featuring Stratum controlled by ONOS and Trellis and running on multi-vendor white boxes with support for P4Runtime, gNMI, and gNOI
• PLVision contributed initial gNOI support to Stratum and ONOS providing system reboot capabilities
• Craig Stevens from Dell submitted the first implementation of the platform configurator support to Stratum
• Tom Everman from Google with the help of Maximilian Pudelko from ONF contributed to Stratum the P4 backed compiler for fixed-function pipelines
• Brian O’ Connor, Carmelo Cascone, and Yi Tseng from ONF presented a new advanced tutorial at the P4 Developer Day Spring 2019 in Stanford titled “Building an SRv6-enabled fabric with P4 and ONOS"

SEBA

A number of brigades were launched in April and work has started on them in earnest

• NEM Tech Profiles Integration Brigade
  • Led by Matteo (ONF)
  • Contributors: Infosys
• SEBA Pod Management and VOLTHA FCAPS Brigade (including Redfish integration)
  • • Led by Scott (ONF)
    • Contributors: Sterlite, EdgeCore
• ONOS FCAPS Brigade
  • • Led by Saurav (ONF)
    • Contributors: Infosys
• Multicast Brigade
  • • Led by Saurav (ONF)
    • Contributors: Netsia, Infosys, Sterlite
    • Design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FNwkcDeVB3C2SpTJP_QrYTlC6sYFo_xwQnxASMk9x2U/edit#heading=h.eh5v7vrjlwlv
    • Looking for contributors for OpenOLT agent (driver) & BAL integration
• BAL 3.0 Brigade
  • • Led by Shad (ONF)
    • Contributors: EdgeCore, Netsia
    • Looking for more contributors
• Micro-OLT integration
  • • Not quite a brigade yet; not on calendar; discussions on SEBA mailing list
    •  Contributors: Delta, Tibit

Trellis

• Ruchi Sahota (Infosys) has upstreamed Route Reprogramming Optimization. This substitutes X flow-mod operations (when a common next-hop for X routes moves) with a single group-mod operation that simply points to the new location of the next-hop referenced by all X flows.
• Sneha Prem (Infosys) has submitted Route Simplification Feature that programs the route flows to only the leaf switches where the next-hop is physically present. This saves significant processing in network situations where the flows are not required on all switches.
• Kalicharan Vuppala (Infosys) has tested various G1GC parameters to tune garbage collections in ONOS/Trellis. His results are published here G1GC parameters tuning
• ONF team discussed how to integrate Multicast in SEBA
• ONF team contributed the Port Load Balancer service which allows to create L2 load balancing group (L2 hashed groups). The new service is currently integrated with XConnect service leveraged by several ONF projects.
• ONF team improved flows stats collection algorithm. In particular, the patch improves OpenFlow provider to avoid stats collection when switch is under high programming load.
• ONF implemented accumulation of the forwarding objectives in the OFDPA pipelines
• ONF improved Component Config Service which now allows to override or not preset values

Charles Chan gave a talk about building scalable ONOS app and lessons learnt from Trellis deployments (slides) during a community event in Taipei.

VOLTHA

• The Adapter Containerization brigade achieved a key milestone by passing traffic using containerized adapters working with the VOLTHA v2.0 core.
• Following completion of the Technical Profile brigade work, v1.7 branch was created and is under QA test.
• Initial proposal for VOLTHA event structure was circulated for discussion.