Community Highlights – May 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 (alphabetical)

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

Aether 

• 5G Core Network functions development has CI integrated.
• 5G NF stability issues are addressed in SMF & AMF.
• Configuration of network functions through common APIs in progress. 

Ambassador Program

• The CALA Ambassador team hosted two successful webinars (in Spanish and Portuguese), introducing the ONF mission and projects for building open source mobile and broadband networks leveraging network disaggregation, white box economics and open source software.

COMAC+OMEC

• We took the backend web console part to run in a dedicated pod for ROC. We also added Makefile and Dockerfile for it.
• We are working on subscriber provisioning for 5G. The first version for ROC will include the basic add/delete for a single subscriber. 

Developer Relations

• See all community contributions in the ONF Community Dashboard.

OIMT

• Continued discussing the security solution. Agreed to sketch the solution architecture picture with respect to the Core model in the controller context. Then validate it with the TAPI application. Also agreed to pull it into the ITU-T SDN architecture when the work is ready. Should try to liaison with MEF and could use some of the MEF work instead of doing all by ourselves.
• Continued discussing enhancement to the Control model, focusing on building a controller – including platform creation, network resources assignment, server contexts configuration, client context administration, and security considerations.
• Discussed feedback on the Location model. Response was that the intent of the Location model is to keep the standards simple. The proposed geospatial models could be quite complex. The proposals could be documented as examples in a new A-series document.
• Discussed network resource lifecycle assignment state.
• The IISOMI sub-project continued cross-SDO modeling tooling coordination. The discussion of issues raised by ITU-T Q14/15 resulted in tentative agreed updates to ONF TR-514 (UML modeling guidelines), TR-531 (UML to YANG mapping guidelines), and GenDoc code enhancement.

ONOS/µONOS

• ONF improved logging in grpc based southbounds and meters can now be annotated to include application specific information.
• Anurag Chadha (HSC) made configurable the private SSH key file path in the NETCONF driver.
• Daniele Moro (ONF) realized several improvement to PI/P4RT subsystems, among which:
• Daniele Moro (ONF) and Miguel Borges de Freitas (Altice Labs) worked on the support of P4RT read-write symmetry in the ONOS core by ensuring that P4RT byte strings are padded to their bit width in the core.
• Daniele Moro (ONF) reinstated the build and upload of the ONOS snapshot artifacts for ONOS 2.5 and ONOS master.

OTCC

• Thanks to work from the TAPI sub-project group under Andrea Mazzini (Nokia), the TAPI 2.3 SDK Release Candidate 1 is now available on github.  This has a number of enhancements to previous versions.

P4

• The P4 language design working group has released version 1.2.2 of the P4 programming language specification. The open-source compiler tools are mostly up-to-date with this specification: 
• Release version 0.5 of the Portable NIC Architecture (PNA) specification was released (note that this still represents a working draft and significant changes are expected to be made before version 1.0 is released. 
• The P4 Education workgroup announced the P4PI project, a P4 on Raspberry Pi platform for networking education. A talk on P4PI was presented at the 2021 P4 Workshop and is available for viewing on-demand.  A P4PI Hackathon will take place in August at ACM SIGCOMM’21.
• 2021 P4 Workshop - In case you missed it, May 18-20th was the 2021 P4 Workshop. It included three days of live keynotes by community members with participation around the world. In addition, there were 25 technical talks, demos and tutorials included as part of the event. Check out all the videos which are now available on-demand.
  • Congratulations to Noa Zilberman, Oxford University, who was awarded the 2021 P4 Distinguished Service Award in honor of her dedicated service to the P4 community as an evangelist and promoter of the P4 language, designer of the P4 -> NetFPGA workflow, and co-chair of the P4 Education Working Group.
  • New P4 Resources Launched
    • A new Slack channel has been created for the P4 community (#p4-dev) on the ONF Community Slack workspace– please join the discussion! If you are not a member of the ONF Community Slack, you can sign up here
    • A new discussion forum has been launched which we invite you to join. There are groups set up for each of the P4 working groups and it features Q&A, search, badges, permanent storage and more. Get started – set up an account and start posting: https://forum.p4.org
    • Check out the P4 website which has undergone a transformation – the P4 ecosystem has been created to enable products, projects and services that leverage P4 to be featured – check it out and get included! Also, a new P4 sandbox is available that offers newbies to P4 a place to try it out, along with some guidance.

SD-RAN

• Work continues with our collaborators Facebook, Radisys, AirHop, and Intel Labs on the Mobility Load Balancing (MLB), PCI conflict Resolution and Mobile Handover (MHO) use cases, with 5G CU/DU/RUs integrated with ONF RIC platform and xAPPs.
• Special thanks to Cory Modlin at Facebook, Bijan Golkar at AirHop and Ranjit Kumar Patro at Radisys for outlining hardware based demo scenarios for MLB and PCI use cases.

SEBA/VOLTHA

• Extensions to the Performance measurements (ANiG, tx-power, several ONU stats) across the openonu and openolt adapter.
• Explicit reconciling state for devices thanks to Ciena.
• Opeonu-go extensions and bug fixes thanks to Adtran, ONF, Netsia, Tibit
• Introduced support for IETF bandwidth profile definition in ONOS and 5 TCONT support across the stack thanks to Netsia and ONF.
• Implemented secure grpc channel between the OLT adapter and agent via gRPC certificate encrypted channel thanks to NETSIA and ONF.
• Added support for the 3200G Radisys OLT in the openolt-agent thanks to Radisys.
• Initial contributions of the OpenDeviceManager and deviceManager-agent with DMI, open source implementations of the DMI interface, thanks to Radisys.
• Expanded suite of tests for TT with voltha components failure/recovery scenarios, also included multi-tcont support, thanks to ONF and Netsia.
• Expanded soak suite of tests including functional and failure scenarios to be executed during the soak period of 15 days. 
• Improved documentation with lab installation instructions. 
• Several bug fixes and enhancements across the stack, mastership upon disconnection in ONOS apps, exposure of parameters via helm charts, empty flows reporting to ONOS and others.

Stratum

• Max Pudelko (ONF) contributed several fixes and features for Stratum Tofino (stratum_bfrt), including direct counters, improved parallelism for packet in/out, P4Runtime canonical bytestrings, and improved log level control via gNMI.

Trellis

• Integrated YourKit Java profiler into TOST dev environment.
• Wailok Shum (ONF) implemented priority support in the Policy framework.
• Improvements in the link events handling and netcfg processing.
• Implemented routing of the packet-outs in fabric.p4; packet-outs can carry an additional metadata which is used to indicate to the parser if the packet should go directly to the egress or go through the entire pipeline.
• Improved config pod which now checks the ONOS netcfg more strictly and ensures it is updated.