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Community Highlights – July 2021

Aug 5, 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
Stratum
ONOS
OIMT
OTCC
Ambassador Program
Developer Relations & Communities

Aether 

  • The Aether Runtime Operational Control (ROC) now includes both control and analytics in a single user interface (ONF).
  • Sample closed-loop control ROC application has been implemented (ONF).
  • 5G core and ROC deployment is in progress (ONF).
  • Additional fault tolerance features in the sd-core adapter (ONF).
  • Netbox integration to improve the efficiency of deployment of new edge sites (ONF).

SD-RAN

  • SD-RAN v1.2 was released on July 23rd - release highlights
    • Integration of Radisys commercial CU/DU software with ONF RIC and xApps from ONF and Facebook .
    • Significant changes to the RIC internals with the introduction of an R-NIB and a UE-NIB among other enhancements.
    • First SD-RAN release fully integrated with ONF's Aether platform.
    • Read more about it in the release notes on the SD-RAN documentation site (requires username/password for your member organization - please contact ONF).
  • Many thanks to Radisys, Facebook, AirHop, and ONF teams for discussions and contributions towards this release.

SD-Core

  • SD-Core techinar was presented by Oğuz Sunay, VP R&D, Mobility. Watch the techinar for current support and upcoming work for SD-Core.
  • SD Core has started a sprint model with a well planned release cycle. We just concluded 0.5 Release of SD-Core. Next release would be 1.0 by the end of September.
  • SD-Core configuration is controlled through REST APIs now. All 5G components can be configured through simple network slicing APIs.
  • Added rest API support for add and delete subscribers.
  • New SIM application is developed for subscriber management in the SD-Core.
  • Multiple features/fixes added in the stability of control and user plane communication, e.g., handling timeouts, rejection, retry of pfcp messages. 
  • Subscriber and gNodeb metrics are exported to prometheus. 
  • Unit Test framework is integrated for AMF repo this month. CI now runs NF’s Unit Tests during the build process and Unit Test success is mandatory for CI pass. In upcoming months we should see many more 5G repositories adding more Unit Test coverage.
  • New multi 5G NF simulator tool (testpod) is being developed to test specific NF. Currently, testpod tests only SMF and simulates other NFs like AMF/PCF/NRF/UDM.
  • Code coverage is integrated for AMF repo this month. CI now shows the test code coverage. 
  • BESS-UPF has made good progress on QoS metering work. This work is in the review phase and will soon be part of SD-Core  release.  Intel & ONF working together on this work item. Amar Srivastava,  Saikrishna Edupuganti from Intel and Badharinath from ONF are collaborating to get this work done. 
  • Shubham from GS-Lab has contributed to few features in SMF related to error handling and PCO related features.  Ankur from ONF team and Shubham working together to drive SMF 3GPP specification compliance.
  • Many thanks to Intel and GS-Lab teams, and several ONF teams for discussions and contributions towards this release.

SD-Fabric

  • Carmelo Cascone (ONF) and Charles Chan (ONF) contributed to slicing and QoS design and initial implementation. They also presented the SD-Fabric Techinar.
  • Daniele Moro (ONF) implemented distributed UPF on all leaves with STC tests.
  • Pier Luigi Ventre (ONF) improved UP4 performance by simplifying the detachment process  and by substituting the global FAR ID allocation with consistent hashing.
  • Darius Grassi (ONF) integrated line-rate testing tools with fabric-tna test infra. Maximilian Pudelko (ONF) contributed line-rate test cases for QoS.
  • Tomasz Osiński (ONF) demonstrated the first PoC of INT support on end hosts based on a modified version of Calico eBPF.
  • Wailok Shun (ONF) improved the P4RT meter subsystem in preparation for slicing/QoS works.
  • Yi Tseng (ONF) completed support for INT flow, drop, and queue reports on Tofino switches.
  • Jon Hall (Ciena) and Siddesh Sreenivasan (ONF) contributed to various integration tests (including dynamic config, pair leaf topology) and failure recovery measurement.

SEBA/VOLTHA

  • VOLTHA community released the first Long Term Support (LTS) release - VOLTHA 2.8 - that will be supported for 18 months with continuous testing, bug fixes, and maintenance releases. In the meantime, we moved to a 6 months release schedule.
  • Highlights of the VOLTHA 2.8 release include new features and testing.
    • Key Features are ETCD 6.2.5 with persistence enabled, Multi Uni per ONU support across the whole stack, ONOS apps and BBSIM, IETF bandwidth profile definition support with 5 Tcont type configuration and selection, distroless and non root docker images for production deployment security. Huge thanks go to David, Khen, Himani, and Maninder from Ciena; Amit from Radisys; Michael and Holger H from ADTRAN; Serkant, Mahir, Birak, Ozge, Gamze, and Yasin from Netsia; Chip from Tibit; and Matteo, Girish, and Andrea from ONF.
    • VOLTHA 2.8 greatly enhanced tests with Full Performance Monitoring Attributes tests, Multi Uni per ONU, OMCI requests failures chaos monkey, Expanded TT tests from 5 to 19, and others. Our thanks go to Hardik from ONF; Torsten from ADTRAN; and Hemran and Huseyin from NETSIA.
    • VOLTHA 2.8 also included the certification for Radisys 3200G GPON OLT DT and ATT tests. We wish to thank the Radisys Team - Babu, Naresh, Thiyiagu, Rajesh, and Debo.
    • On the DMI front we moved forward with a 1.0 release, thanks to Amit, Chandrakanth and the team from Radisys, Holger S from Adtran and the others. 
    • More info about VOLTHA v2.8 can be found here in the release notes.
  • View the video and slides from the VOLTHA v2.8 Techinar here for more details about the release.
  • Saurav Das (ONF) stepped down from his position as SEBA/VOLTHA TST Chair. Andrea Campanella (ONF) was appointed as the new Chair.

P4

  • Don’t miss the debut of P4PI during SIGCOMM at the “Hackathon: P4 on Raspberry PI (P4PI)” session. P4PI enables designing and deploying P4-based network devices using the Raspberry Pi platform and is based on the T4P4S compiler. P4PI is developed as part of the P4 Education Workgroup activities. This session will be presented by Sándor Laki , Robert Soulé, and Noa Zilberman. Check out the SIGCOMM  web page for all the details and register to attend!

Stratum

  • Brian O’Connor and Max Pudelko (ONF) presented the Stratum v21.06 Techinar that covered highlights from the past two Stratum releases and presented the roadmap for the remainder of 2021 and broader switch OS landscape.
  • Max added version stamps to Stratum release builds. Version information including git commit, timestamp, and build server are now logged when Stratum starts, which is a great tool when debugging issues.
  • Max published a new stratum-tools package and Docker container  that includes the bf_pipeline_builder, gnmi_cli, stratum_replay tool, and other useful tools. This container deprecates existing tools containers, and users should migrate to the new unified container.

ONOS

  • The 2.6.0 (“Woodpecker") release of ONOS is now available. The main deliverables in this release are:
    • P4RT southbound
      • Support P4 one-shot action profile programming
      • Support arbitrary bit width action parameter and match field
      • Support all tables wildcard read
      • Support Optional match fields
      • Add digest to P4InfoBrowser
      • Support direct meters in generating P4 constants
      • Force push pipeline configuration
      • Enable read counters with table entries for stratum-tofino based devices
    • GNMI southbound
      • Support last-change leaf
    • Library updates
      • Atomix 3.1.9
    • Route subsystem
      • Improved scalability
      • Integrated bulk update for ConsistentMultimap
    • FlowRule Subsytem
      • Allow delete of flows with empty actions
    • GUI
      • Support customized traffic highlight in GUI
    • FlowObjective Susbsystem
      • Adding annotations to flowobjective
    • Meter Subsystem
      • Adding annotations to meter
      • Make OpenFlowMeterProvider configurable
    • Build Process
      • Add dockerfile to build an ONOS container from the local Bazel output
    • Miscellaneous
      • Private SSH Key File Path made configurable for passwordless netconf ssh connection
      • Add command to force snapshots of RAFT partitions
    • Bugfix
      • Bug fixed for duplicate events when netconf device goes down
      • Bug fixed for driver not found in case of ipv6 address being used in short notation
      • Invalidating the pipeliner cache if the driver for a device changes
      • Fix mastership when P4RT stream channel is not opened correctly
      • Wrong max inbound metadata size for gRPC channels
      • Bug fixed in the Application subsystem which prevented the loading of drivers that have dependencies
      • Various bug fixes for P4RT mirror store, PiPipeconf and GeneralDeviceProvider
      • Wrong flowId computation
      • Prevent the listener ejection in several subsytem
      • Prevent the stop of group reconciliation in MeterDriverProvider
      • Unset correct delegate during FlowObjectiveService deactivation
    • Java profiler
      • Integrate YourKit profiler into the ONOS build process
    • Use case support - VOLTHA
      • Extract the OLT pipeliners from ONOS
      • Adding support to VLAN and PCP treatment on PPPoED flows.
      • Changed how ODTN OPENRoadm driver assigns ONOS port ids
    • Use case support - SD-Fabric
      • Integrate Mastership Load Balancer and Java profiler into SD-Fabric
      • Add UpfProgrammable interface to ONOS core
      • Various SD-Fabric specific features and bug fixes
      • Policy framework backport to fabric.p4
  • There are several ways you can get 2.6.0:
    • Source code from Gerrit or GitHub (tag: 2.6.0).
    • Pre-packaged tar.gz archives available on the downloads page.
    • Java artifacts via Maven Central Repository.
    • Docker image from Docker Hub, project onosproject/onos, tag 2.6.0.
  • Release 2.7.0 (“X-Wing”) is slated for release in December. High level work planned is as follows:
    • P4Runtime client - updated to support latest features (in to be released 1.4.0) including roles.
    • FlowObjectives - updated to support weight attribute for WCMP.
    • PINS support continues (P4RT and gNMI driver enhancements).
    • Improving P4RT SB for slicing and QoS (meter, queue).
    • Performance enhancement on various subsystems if needed.
    • Enhancements and optimization for meters and groups subsystems for VOLTHA

OIMT

  • O-RAN Alliance is looking for modeling tooling and started participating in the OIMT IISOMI weekly calls to discuss using ONF TR-514 (UML Modeling Guidelines) and TR-515 (Papyrus Guidelines) and possible funding for enhancing the UML-YANG automatic translation tooling (xmi2yang).
  • Progressing ONF TR-512Core Information Model” Release 1.5 for publication in 2H 2021.

OTCC

  • TAPI subproject, led by Andrea Mazzini (Nokia), has been working on an update to TR-547 TAPI v2.1.3 Reference Implementation Agreement, which would become v1.1 of the TR and would include new use cases and OAM work.  Ramon Casellas (CTTC) is the main editor, with contributions from Nigel Davis (Ciena) and Pedro Amaral (Infinera).
  • 5G xHaul subproject, led by Thorsten Heinze (Telefonica Germany) is actively working on extensions to the ONF Core Model for specific technologies in RAN equipment including Ethernet, TDM containers, and synchronization.  Martin Skorupski (Highstreet) has been organizing discussions with many contributors.  Results can be seen here in github

Ambassador Program

  • We are happy to welcome new Ambassadors to our Ambassador Program:
    • Daniel Lazkani Feferman - a consultant at the Technology Center of TIM Brazil, focusing mainly on IoT technologies & Open Source solutions. Working as a hobby with Python and Raspberry Pi applied to the stock market. BSc. in Telecom Engineering at UFF and MSc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UNICAMP. Received a fully funded scholarship from the Brazilian government to study at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), studied alternative energies, security in operational systems, computer networks and VSAT. Former researcher at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in a project of antennas simulations for smartphones using CST Studio.
    • Bayhan Sayinti - an ONF Accredited SDN Trainer since 2018, works as a Software Defined DevNetOps specialist in Turkey, with 20+ years experience of network software design & testing. Holds Bachelor and Master's degree in Electronics and Comm. Engineering and chasing PhD (Gebze Technical University) in SDN based Routing for Clustered Wireless Mesh Networks. Experienced in technical & business development in wired/wireless networks for ISPs and Telecom Operators, including providing training in SDN, Cloud Networking and DevNetOps. As an Open Networking evangelist, believes in access and edge systems for Industrial & Massive Internet of Things and works on underlying technologies to get the most for people and environment.

Developer Relations and Communities

  • Several ONF Community wiki pages have been updated by Ain Indermitte and respective project leads to reflect the addition of two recent ONF projects and changes to others
    • SEBA - new community wiki page created, SEBA wiki in opencord deprecated (Andrea Campanella at ONF)
    • VOLTHA - new community wiki page created, VOLTHA wiki in opencord deprecated (Andrea Campanella at ONF)
    • SD-Core - new community wiki page created (Ajay Thakur at ONF)
    • SD-Fabric - new community wiki page created (Charles Chan at ONF)
  • Several Contributor License Agreement (CLA) portal usability improvements where made by our summer intern Nitin Subramanian, including
    • Color scheme changes
    • Improved search options
  • Community contributions tracking now reflects newly added projects SD-Core and SD-Fabric (Ain Indermitte at ONF and our analytics provider Bitergia)
  • See all community contributions in the ONF Community Dashboard
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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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