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Community Highlights – March 2021

Apr 7, 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 (alphabetical)

Aether
Ambassador Program
COMAC+OMEC
Developer Relations
OIMT
ONOS/µONOS
OTCC
P4
SD-RAN
SEBA/VOLTHA
Stratum
Trellis

Aether 

In this month’s Aether update, we are focusing on 4G/5G Core:

  • The initial version of P4-based dual core 4G/5G user plane function is now in production at various Aether sites.
  • Work is in progress to introduce QoS and network slicing to this user plane function.
  • Towards this end, support for default bearers is now available.
  • The containerized, disaggregated 5G mobile core control plane inter-operable with P4-based dual core user plane function is undergoing scale, performance, availability, and reliability testing on Aether’s staging platform prior to being operationalized.
  • Programmable runtime control of mobile core is being enhanced to include traffic and subscriber policies and associated northbound APIs are being defined and developed.
  • Integration efforts for 5G connectivity specific monitoring, logging and alerts with platform tools have commenced.

Ambassador Program

  • We are excited to welcome our latest Ambassadors in the Americas region:
    • Fernando Adrian Cerioni - more than 20 years of experience in IT & Telecom with notable companies, including Motorola, Cisco Systems, Affirmed Networks, Parallel Wireless and Mavenir, being exposed to both VC-backed, successful startups as well as established big companies. Throughout his career Fernando held Product Strategy, Product Management, Business Development and Marketing roles for Broadband Access, VoIP/Multimedia, Mobile Networks Core and RAN / OpenRAN. He worked with global Tier 1 carriers on their network strategies and deployments. Fernando has an MBA from Babson College and MSEE from ITBA Buenos Aires, Argentina. He lives in Boston, USA, with his wife and four children. Hobbies include running obstacle races with his family, skiing and mountain climbing.
  • The Ambassador Program A-team elections were held in March, read about the election results here. As of April 1, 2021, the new A-team will consist of the following five members:
    • Andrea Campanella (Open Networking Foundation, Milan, Italy) – term from 2Q/2021 until 1Q/2023
    • Ain Indermitte (Open Networking Foundation, Menlo Park, California, USA) – term from 2Q/2020 until 1Q/2022
    • Łukasz Łukowski (Edgecore Networks, Leszno, Wielkopolskie, Poland) – term from 2Q/2020 until 1Q/2022
    • Andres Madero (Infinera, Tampa Bay, Florida, USA) – term from 2Q/2021 until 1Q/2023
    • Scott Swail (Lumentum, San Jose, California, USA) – term from 2Q/2020 until 1Q/2022
  • This is also a good time to remind you that if you are interested in joining our Ambassador Program, please check out the program and apply here.

COMAC+OMEC

  • 4G/5G Core is deployed on Central GCP Public Cloud. We are validating deployment with NG4T test tool. So far we are able to validate a couple of call flows. E.g. registration, deregistration, data flow. 
  • OMEC project 5GC repository is synced up with free5GC to 3.0.5 release.
  • Each 5G Network Function will have its own Dockerfile/makefile, this simplifies dependency and CI/CD process.
  • Work is in progress to validate 4G/5G Core deployment with Radysis gNodeB.
  • Scale Test for 50 Calls/Sec & 100 calls/sec passes for 4G Core
  • PCRF has finalized Policy configuration at PCRF and this will help to achieve many practical use cases. 

Developer Relations

OIMT

  • Continue exploring updates to the Physical Equipment model, Control model, Multi-point optical media channel connection, and state model.   
  • Initial draft of TR-512.17Foundation (State)” was created, which was split from TR-512.3 “Foundation (Identifiers, naming and state)” and has updates to the lifecycle state and with respective to the shared-ownership aspects.
  • The IISOMI tooling team is exploring Model2Doc as an alternative tool to Gendoc for documentation automatic generation from the base Papyrus UML models. Initial draft of TR-512.17Foundation (State)” was created, which was split from TR-512.3 “Foundation (Identifiers, naming and state)” and has updates to the lifecycle state and with respective to the shared-ownership aspects.   

ONOS/µONOS

  • ONOS classic 2.2.8 has been released
  • ONOS classic now depends on Atomix 3.1.9 which includes:
    • Update to the Atomix Docker image
    • Bug fixes and optimizations for the MultiMap
    • A new interface to force the snapshots of the partitions
  • ONOS legacy GUI has been enhanced in support of the Aether/Pronto demos to allow applications better control over visualization of the network topology and traffic.
    • Similar enhancements should be ported forward to the GUI2
  • A few bug fixes and enhancements have been contributed to the NETCONF subsystem of ONOS classic thanks tu Anurag Chadha from HSC
  • The VOLTHA team has provided some fixes and enhancements thanks to production deployments experience
    • The Flow Objective manager has been enhanced to re-build the pipeliner cache when a device changes driver. 
    • in service upgrade of ONOS apps has been demonstrated
    • PPPoE packet support
  • Number of µONOS components and associated Helm charts were released as part of the SD-RAN 1.0.1 release.

OTCC

  • TAPI Subproject plans to hold a virtual meeting on April 12, 13 and 15, being organized and led by Andrea Mazzini (Nokia).  Work is continuing on completion of a streaming document (under Nigel Davis, Ciena) and an update to TR-547 TAPI Reference Implementation Agreement (under Ramon Casellas, CTTC)
  • Results of OIF TAPI testing have been received from OIF via liaison (see Liaisons at https://wiki.opennetworking.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=287997985).  An ONF blog entry is now published with testing description, view the blog.
  • 5g xHaul Subproject under Thorsten Heinze (Telefonica) has complemented the set of technology specific augmentations to the Core IM by Firmware Management.  UML and YANG have been provided, first implementations are to be expected in 2 or 3 weeks.

P4

  • The 2021 P4 Workshop is a virtual event that will take place May 18-20th. We expect participation from speakers and attendees around the world - you won’t want to miss this event! Register to attend and consider submitting a CFP (deadline is April 12th).  Learn more

SD-RAN

  • Released SD-RAN 1.1. As our community grew this quarter, we continued to build on the components introduced in the first release - micro-ONOS based nRT-RIC, whitebox LTE CU/DU/RU solution, and sdRan-in-a-Box (RiaB).
  • As many of you in the community are aware, this quarter we worked closely with Facebook and AirHop to demonstrate SON functionality as an xApp, work which required creating new Service Models, rearchitecting our RAN Simulator, introducing a new app-SDK and much more. Along the way, we also upgraded our stack to the latest E2AP and E2SM-KPM specifications from O-RAN. Read more about it in the release notes on the SD-RAN documentation site.
  • In particular, our documentation includes extensive installation guides for bringing up the solution on RAN hardware or in a completely virtualized form on a server/VM using RiaB. If you do not have access to the site, contact us for the username/password for your organization.

SEBA/VOLTHA

  • SEBA RD 2.0 has been released. Noteworthy additions on top of 1.0 are:
    • Detailed NBI APIs for POD, OLT, ONT, Service Management
    • Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) Updates
    • Device Management (DM)
    • Per OLT VOLTHA Stack Model for Scaling
    • Access Technology – Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) / mmWAVE 
    • Use Cases for POD Lifecycle Management
  • VOLTHA 2.7 has been released, please check the release notes. Noteworthy items are: 
    • In-service software upgrade of ONOS apps and VOLTHA components
    • ONU software upgrade via OMCI
    • Performance Metrics and Alarms from the openonu adapter
    • Distinction of the OLT disconnection vs reboot
    • AES Encryption for the GEM Ports
    • PPPoE Intermediate agent ONOS app
    • Flow Error reporting form adapter to the core and to ONOS
    • Scale improvements and fixes:
      • Validation of TCONT and Gem Port IDs at scale (both via OMCI and flows)
      •  igmpproxy, mcast and olt for TT multicast workflow.
    • Introduction of voltha-infra and voltha-stack helm charts
    • Test: Soak testing, TT scale multicast, PM, components and app in service upgrade

Stratum

  • Brian O’Connor, Max Pudelko, and Yi Tseng (ONF) released Straum 21.03, which includes many enhancements and fixes for Tofino as well as some fixes for several gNMI paths from Max. In this release, Stratum now uses the P4Runtime 1.3.0 specification, but is not yet fully compliant with some of the semantics of this release. It is also the first release of Stratum that has been (almost entirely) automated.
  • Rich Renner (Sunder Networks) added support for the Stratum Tofino simulator in Mininet.
  • Narada Hess (Extreme Networks) provided some enhancements to the Stratum development environment.

Trellis

  • Implemented new policy framework
    • Support drop and redirect (pinning traffic to specific spines) policy
    • Can be configured via Java API, CLI and REST API
  • Implemented log-based alert, triggered by errors and known issues
  • Periodically checks of the network configuration and push again when missing
    • To solve an issue when the entire K8s cluster goes down
  • Push pipeline again when the entire ONOS cluster goes down
    • To solve an issue in P4RT southbound default entries mirror store

 

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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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