Community Highlights – August 2021

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(New Project)
Stratum
ONOS
OIMT
OTCC
Ambassador Program
Developer Relations & Communities

Aether 

• The Aether 1.5 release has been deployed to an internal development cluster, with ROC simultaneously controlling 4G and 5G cores. Deployment to staging and production is next.
• A migration tool has been developed to update Aether 1.0 models to Aether 1.5.
• A dashboard was created in Galyleo to visualize Aether uptime, in collaboration with engageLively.
• Significant documentation updates for the Aether 1.5 release, including documentation of using the BESS UPF with Aether.
• Subscriber Proxy was implemented to allow automatic ROC learning of IMSIs from the sim management application.
• Alerting has been added to the Aether ROC GUI.

SD-RAN

• Alan Wang and Ravi Lekhwani from Facebook helped with the AirHop eSON server  integration with Radisys CU for the PCI and MLB use cases.
• ONF team completed work on a new use case - Mobile Handovers - including the implementation of a new Service Model, RANSim upgrades, and a new xApp.
• ONF team continued work on a new use case - RAN Slicing - involving OAI based white-box DU and a new Service Model for slicing.
• ONF team continued work on upgrades to officially released O-RAN specs E2AP 2.0 and E2SM-KPM 2.0, along with the ability to run multiple instances of the RIC microservices and xApps for load balancing and HA.
• sdran-dev mailing list and Community meetings are now open for anyone to join. As you join the mailing list, you will automatically receive invites to SD-RAN Community meetings taking place every first and third Thursday of the month at 9am Pacific time via Zoom.

SD-Core

• QoS metering support is available in SD-Core with software UPF (i.e., BESS-UPF). This was a joint effort from Intel and the ONF team. 
• BESS UPF now has structured logging support and also logs can be enabled/disabled and logging level can be set. 
• The Facebook team successfully accessed internet connectivity using SD-Core as control plane and BESS-UPF as user plane. Facebook team Ravi Lekhwani and Alex Thomas helped to carry out this task.
• NTT team carrying out tests with SD-Core 5G for various 5G procedures.
• AMF Design changes to handle high scale UE attach rate is in progress
• AMF Design changes to support Collision handling in progress
• 4G network functions (i.e., SPGW, PCRF, HSS, MME) now support REST interface to add/update/delete network slice configuration.
• Successfully configured  SD-Core through ROC for both 4G & 5G connectivity.  
• SMF design changes to handle session modification failures as per 3GPP specification in progress.
• SMF support for I-UPF is in progress.

SD-Fabric

• Daniele Moro (ONF) and Charles Chan (ONF) completed the initial implementation of control plane support for Slicing and QoS of 4G traffic (via UP4 and SlicingManager).
• Charles Chan (ONF) verified dual-homed DHCP server support.
• Yi Tseng (ONF) implemented improvements to the ONOS INT app and to the helm charts to deploy DeepInsight.
• Daniele Moro and Yi Tseng (ONF) are working on new system integration tests for the UPF, QoS, and INT features.
• Max Pudelko and Carmelo Cascone (ONF) created new line-rate test cases for QoS.
• Tomasz Osiński (ONF) contributed a design for a CNI-independent Host-INT support. Initial implementation and testing for Cilium is in progress. 
• Darius Grassi (ONF) automated running fabric-tna line-rate tests on Jenkins nightly.
• Jon Hall (Ciena) improved test methodology for failure recovery performance and added new test cases for failure in pair leaf topology.
• Siddesh Sreenivasan (ONF) implemented test cases for dynamic config update.
• Pier Luigi Ventre (ONF) contributed performance and scale improvements for the control plane UPF integration, now supporting 5K UE, 10 ops/s with 1 CPU core and 4GB RAM for each ONOS container.
• Pier Luigi Ventre (ONF) optimized the resource usage of the L3 Unicast Indirect groups, by this modification it is possible to support theoretically up to 1,024 nexthops (before was 64).  
• Wailok Shum (ONF) and Pier Luigi Ventre (ONF) contributed several improvements to the P4Runtime meter subsystem in ONOS. We want to give a special thanks to Miguel Borges de Freitas (Altice Labs), who helped in the review process of the patches and provided valuable feedback.  
• Carmelo Cascone (ONF) wrote a blog post on P4-UPF. Will be published on the ONF website shortly.
• We now support BF SDE 9.5.0. Carmelo Cascone (ONF) also reduced fabric-tna pipeline stage utilization. 

SEBA/VOLTHA

• The VOLTHA 2.8 LTS (Long Term Support) release has received good appraisals from the operators deploying it. They praise its stability and feature completeness, showing how the surge and stabilization efforts in the past year have paid off. A huge thanks goes to everybody who participated in the effort and made contributions towards this goal. 
• Certification of two new Radisys OLTs, 1600G and 1600X, the first Combo Box (GPON and XGS-PON combined), for now in GPON mode only, thanks to Babu, Thyiagu, and the rest of the Radisys team, as well as Matteo, Girish, and Andrea from ONF. 
• Started a full rewrite of the OLT application for ONOS to achieve better code quality, performance, and extensibility, thanks in particular to Matteo from ONF.
• Started the work and submitted initial patches for review to move from Kafka to gRPC for internal container to container communication, improving performance, stability, and greatly simplifying the system, thanks to Ciena, in particular to Khen and David. 
• Started implementation of MPLS support in VOLTHA to achieve double tagging with MPLS labels at the OLT, thanks to Amit and Salman from Radisys. 
• Introduced configurable Kubernetes lower and upper resource limits to all components’ helm charts, thanks to Andrey from Reply. 
• Deprecated several unused repositories to remove clutter and simplify project tests, thanks to Andrea from ONF and David from Ciena. 
• Fixed several bugs and made minor improvements in the openonu-go, thanks to Holger, Michael, Torsten, Girish, and Chip. 
• Introduced a continuous ping test during error/failure scenarios, thanks to Hardik from ONF.

P4

• Incoming and Outgoing  P4 Working Group Co-Chairs
  • Steffen Smolka (Google) has agreed to serve as co-chair of the API Working Group. He is stepping in to replace Waqar Mohsin (Google) who has served as co-chair of the group for the past few years and plans to stay involved with its activities as an ordinary member. A warm thank you to Waqar for all of his contributions to the P4 community. Antonin Bas will continue serving as the other co-chair for the working group.
  • Fernando Ramos (University of Lisbon) has agreed to serve as co-chair of the Education Working Group. He will be replacing Robert Soulé (Yale University) who is rotating out of the co-chair role but undoubtedly will stay closely involved in P4-related education activities. A sincere thank you to Robert for his efforts and contributions to the P4 community. Noa Zilberman will continue in her role as the other co-chair for this working group.
• The first P4Pi release occurred at the beginning of August - you can check it out in the github repository.
• ACM SIGCOMM 2021
  • The P4 Education working group organized the P4Pi Hackathon. They had about 40 participants and some very interesting projects. Overall, it was a great success. The session was led by Sándor Laki, Robert Soulé, and Noa Zilberman. Check out the videos to learn more about this exciting project!
  • A tutorial, Network-Accelerated Distributed Deep Learning covered a range of techniques that are effective at mitigating the network communication bottleneck and accelerate the performance of distributed training. The session includes an introduction on scaling distributed machine learning from a networking-centric perspective and a walk through of different solutions for accelerating network communication, beginning with in-network aggregation, describing SwitchML (a system for distributed machine learning that accelerates data-parallel training using P4 switches) as an example of co-design of programmable switch-based processing and end-host protocols.

PINS (New Project)

• P4 Integrated Network Stack (PINS) is an industry collaboration bringing SDN capabilities and P4 programmability to traditional routing devices that rely on embedded control protocols (like BGP). Specifically, this project uses P4 to model the SAI pipeline, adds externally programmable extensions to the pipeline, and introduces P4Runtime as a new control plane interface for controlling the pipeline.
• The PINS working group is an ONF member-only group that has been incubating these new features on SONiC, a popular open source network operating system started by Microsoft and deployed in several hyperscalers’ data centers. The PINS working group members include Alibaba, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, Innovium, Intel, and NVIDIA. 
• The working group has open sourced the PINS design documents — High Level Designs (HLDs) in SONiC parlance — and is in the process of reviewing them with the broader SONiC community. These documents were authored by:
  • Google: Bhagat Janarthanan, Waqar Mohsin, Mythil Raman, Robert Halstead, Runming Wu, Srikishen Shanmugam, Stephen Wang, Steffen Smolka
  • Intel: Ravi Vantipalli, Reshma Sudarshan, Sagar Balani, Sunesh Rustagi
  • ONF: Brian O’Connor
• A special thanks to the additional people who have contributed to the PINS designs:
  • Alibaba: Ennan Zhai
  • Arista:  Abhilash Sampatoor, Roman Chertov
  • Broadcom: Mehak Mahajan
  • Cisco: Aaron Millisor, Reda Haddad, Bhavani Parise
  • Innovium: Rupa Budhia, Tony Titus, Ayyappa Nuthalapati
  • Microsoft: Guohan Lu, Lihua Yuan
  • NVIDIA: Alan Lo, Marian Pritsak, Matty Kadosh
  • ONF: Daniele Moro, Don Newton, Max Pudelko, Niloofar Toorchi
  • Google: Konstantin Weitz, Stefan Heule, and many others (sorry if we missed you!)

Stratum

• Max Pudelko (ONF) improved QoS on Tofino -- users can now use the Stratum port ID to specify QoS configuration and meter entries have been updated to adhere to the P4Runtime spec.
• Pier Ventre (ONF) updated the Stratum Mininet script to allow users to specify the admin state of ports when they are initialized. Moreover, he updated behavioral-model dependency to include recent bug fixes that improved bmv2 stability and meter support on bmv2.
• Max paid down some technical debt by fixing code formatting and addressing other compiler warnings.

ONOS

• Pier Luigi Ventre (ONF) improved stability by preventing the ejection of  the event listeners in several subsystem and by preventing the cancellation of the group stats poller.
• Daniele Moro (ONF) implemented a method to purge flows, groups, and meters by device id and application id.

OIMT

• Liaison statement to ITU-T SG15 Q12 & Q14 to share the early draft of the lifecycle and security considerations for an SDN controller (Draft TR-512-Appendix-ControllerLifecycleAndSecurity.docx [Editor - Malcolm Betts (ZTE)]). OIMT intends to publish the final version as an appendix to TR-512 version 1.6 in 2022.
• Progressing ONF TR-512 “Core Information Model” Release 1.5 for publication in 2H 2021.
  • Chief Editor Nigel Davis (Ciena), with the assistance of Co-editor Kam Lam (FiberHome), has further completed the revision of the following additional parts.
    • TR-512.8 (Control)
    • TR-512.10 (Interaction pattern)
    • TR-512.11 (Processing construct)
    • TR-512.12 (Software)

OTCC

• Andrea Mazzini (Nokia), TAPI subproject lead, announced the availability of TAPI Release 2.3 on August 19.  TAPI 2.3 can be found at github.
  • There is also a  link to TAPI213vs23rc1Vs23.pdf [github.com] where the main differences wrt 2.1.3 and 2.3 RC1 are listed.
  • With respect to 2.3 RC1 the main change regards alarm/TCA data types, now aligned for both Notification and Streaming models. Previous types have been maintained for backward compatibility.

Ambassador Program

• We are happy to welcome a new Ambassador to our Ambassador Program:
  • Udaya Kumar R - digital systems specialist from Coimbatore, India, focused on communications engineering. Thirty-five years of experience in the digital technology and services industry. He started his career in sales and marketing communications, networking, and computer systems, and then ventured into his own small business Arkey Information Systems. Udaya is passionate about taking ONF projects to the researchers in academia and industry to develop a robust and secure state-of-the-art telecommunications network providing seamless coverage with special focus on rural and remote areas of the Indian subcontinent. He is working on bridging the digital divide and facilitating socio-economic development of more than a billion people, and creating an inclusive knowledge-based society through proliferation of affordable and high quality broadband and mobile services across the nation. Udaya  is interested in developing a new category for open source 5G Connected Edge platform for enabling enterprise digital transformation for small to medium enterprises. He is also working on developing new micro CORD projects for rural centers servicing more than half a million villages in India.

Developer Relations and Communities

• Further Contributor License Agreement (CLA) portal usability improvements have been completed by Matteo Scandolo (ONF).
• See all community contributions in the ONF Community Dashboard