Welcome to the H release page for the O-RAN Software community.
The H release is currently in incubation; initiating the definition of the requirements
Non-Real-time RIC (NONRTRIC)
Primary Goals:
R1 Service Exposure & Management
Continuing work of Service execution platform extensions (K8s, Istio, Keycloak, OPA, Gateway) to enable and enforce service isolation & exposure
First version of 3GPP CAPIF-aligned Service Registration & Discovery service available. Will continue integration with related work on rApp management & Service exposure enforcement.
R1 Data Management & Exposure
Aligning with emerging proposals for R1-DME where possible
R1 DME Data Catalog support in NONRTRIC ICS
R1 Data delivery & filtering (Kafka & REST)
Investigating approaches for access to stored data
Continuing prototyping with PM data exposure, filtering & access control
Additional support for stored data access (S3 currently supported) (InfluxDB tbc) .
rApp Manager
Building on ONAP “Automation Composition” model & platform to implement rApp use cases
Overlap with Service Exposure work to examine role of an rApp Manager to support controlled exposure & LCM of µService and non-µService parts of an rApp
Hope to start work on supporting ASD-based rApps
Support KServe App components
Continued A1-Policy & A1-Enrichment-Information evolution (& R1-A1)
Sample use cases (rApps)
Requirements Drivers for rApp/R1 development
High degree of cross-project integration activity
Testing, Maintenance & Housekeeping
Function Test & Integration Test environment,
Support integration, deployment & configuration of SMO/Non-RT-RIC related functions & usecases in OSC Integration env.
Project coordination, Documentation, Delivery, Reporting, Cross-project alignment, Community demos, O-RAN Standardization support, etc.
H Release - Highlights:
Count of Epics (20 issues), User Stories, Tasks, and Issues: (455 issues) Relevant Epics (Draft/Incomplete. Mostly in progress):
Near-Real-time RAN Intelligent Controller Platform (E2 Interface) (RICPLT)
Original primary goals based on contributions from Nokia, Samsung, HCL, Capgemini, Parallel Wireless, Alexandre Huff (UTFPR) and Abhijit G:
We will deprecate the RMR-based E2 subscription interface and H-release xApps need to use the REST based interface already supported by the the C++, go, and python xApp frameworks (RIC-375). The subscription manager should handle subscriptions for failing xApps (RIC-929) and provide a callback on subscription delete success/failure (RIC-928). We plan to implement the RIC subscription delete required procedure (RIC-851)
Update to newer golang version of all components (RIC-881)
We will develop a CRD, i.e., a K8S operator on top of the DMS REST API to simplify xApp deployment (RIC-715). Also the DMS Rest interface gets the missing delete API (RIC-954). RIC-717 allows to deploy multiple cooperating xApps together.
On E2 side we will implement the E2 Reset procedure from RAN to RIC (RIC-949) and the RIC Subscription Delete procedure (RIC-851). We also implement robustness improvements (RIC-932 for reconnect cases) and troubleshooting improvements (RIC-813, RIC-814).
There's work planned to deploy the kserve-based model provisioning from the AI/ML project into the RIC platform (RIC-955)
The xapp frameworks for Golang (RIC-930), C++ and Rust (RIC-951) will get some enhancements that are already implemented in the other languages, incl. support for xApp registration in the xapp-framework-cpp (RIC-705).
E2T (RIC-813) and E2Mgr (RIC-814) support dynamic changing of log levels for better troubleshooting
RIC-953 A1 testing improvements and bug fixes
Added to plan during H:
Support for policy status notifications in A1 (RIC-973 (incl. RIC-975))
Achieved H release highlights = high-level release notes (2023-06-20) below (note that the release image list is here: link)
E2 reset (from E2 node to RIC), E2 subscription delete required, A1 policy status notifications
Preparation of feature for I release, e.g., include xApps in subscription delete required decision
For the H release of the near-RT RIC we do only limited integration testing: only the use cases: deploy RIC, deploy xApp, make E2 connection, get list of A1 policies has been tested.
Status 2023-06-20: From the 23 epics planned (link) we implemented 11(link). 12 items have been moved out of the H release, e.g, because of implementation delays (link). Incomplete items: 0 (link). Additionally we fixed 10 bugs and small implementation tasks (link)
H release source code, container images and deployment instructions
The list of container images for the release (link). A demo video for the H release deployment is available at the top of the demo page and shows
how to deploy the near-RT RIC platform,
compile connect the E2 (e2 node) simulator from the OSC simulator project and
compile the hw-go xapp from the xapp project and use the dms_cli to deploy it and check the E2 subscriptions the xApp created.
Code coverage: Code coverage reports (current coverage and list of components that need to set up Jenkins job for auto-generation of the reports as part of CI)
Operation and Maintenance (OAM)
Primary Goals:
Provide complete implementation for OAM functions (FCAPS).
H release Feature Scope:
Updates according to O-RAN Operations and Maintenance Interface Specification 8.0 (O-RAN.WG10.O1-Interface.0-v08.00) October 2022
To support multiple scheduler algorithms new framework has been introduced with open scheduler API function pointers, which could be initiated as per the chosen algorithm
Alignment to the ORAN WG8 AAD specification
Aligning to the latest WG8 AAD specification, also provide inputs to WG8 for further releases as there are many implementation challenges with the current specification.
Inter – CU Handover
Support for mobility between source and target DUs connected to separate CUs.
E2 interface enhancement
Feature study and task planning completed
Few Global APIs added
Further implementation to be continued in the next release
End-to-end integration
Successfully bring up Radisys containerized O-CU in NTUST lab.
Integration stopped due to the unavailability of TM500 in the NTUST lab, to be resumed once the TM500 is available.
In TDD mode, an issue has been raised on O-DU-Low related to the PRACH index issue. O-DU-Low to deliver a patch to resume the testing.
H release source code, container images, and deployment instructions (and status)
Jira: Count of Epics, User Stories, Tasks, and Issues: 5 issues
H release highlights/accomplishments ( ):
Updated simulated O-RU YANG models according to latest release (March 2023) OpenFronthaul Management Plane specification
Implement the Monitoring NETCONF connectivity feature for the O-RUs, according to chapter 6.7 (Monitoring NETCONF connectivity) in O-RAN.WG4.MP.0-R003-v11.00
Created a mechanism to locally build simulated O-DU with 3GPP YANG models
No new contributions for the E2 Simulator
H release source code, container images and deployment instructions
The container images for SMO can be found on the Nexus server, where applicable. The container images for OpenStack Tacker can be found in OpenStack Kolla repository.
INF is a downstream project of StarlingX and Yocto Project, the above coverage report may not reflect the real code coverage, so we also need to refer to the status from upstream projects.
Primary Goals: Make each OSC projects to adopt XTesting framework and contribute test cases that can be run at release time for validation. Stretch goal would be to write additional integration test cases based on across project interactions.
H Feature Scope / Achievements:
Convert existing RICPLT/RICAPP Robot test cases in it/test repo to be executed with XTesting, which should automate the deployment of RIC platform, onboarding an xApp, and execute test cases all together.
Wind River may contribute XTesting test cases on the o2 repo
Specific to the Asia Pacific Open Lab:
Completing E2 setup procedure between OSC Near-RT RIC and OAI gNb.
Incorporate E2AP v2 in OAI CU for connection between OAI CU and OSC Near-RT RIC.
Verify data exchange between netconf and ves between OAI CU and OSC SMO.
Testing C-plane in F1 interface connection between OAI CU and OSC DU.