 Welcome everybody to this panel discussion on the first global platform sponsored by the Open RAN Alliance or ORAN. My name is Drew Gupta. I'm with AT&T and I'm currently the co-chair of ORAN Alliance Working Group 2. And it's my pleasure to host this panel with my colleagues. Next slide, please. So just a bit of introduction to the ORAN Alliance and the platform. So ORAN Alliance is a consortium or global community of more than 200 members, including mobile operators, vendors, as well as research and academic institutions. And all of these members are committed to evolving the current radio access networks based on the core principles of openness and intelligence. The key mission for ORAN Alliance is to drive our industry towards a more open, multi-render, virtualized and interoperable network stage. And the ORAN Alliance accomplishes this in many ways. It publishes RAN technical specifications related to the interfaces that are defined by the ORAN community. And it also releases open software via its ORAN software community or OSC. In order to showcase the nature of the interfaces that are being defined by ORAN, including the O1, A1, E2 and front hall specification, and to highlight the multi-vendor interoperability aspect, ORAN conducted its first global podcast in December of 2019. This was attended by 30-plus operator and vendor partners. And all together they demonstrated 10 different scenarios and use cases that both highlighted and validated the interface specifications that have been published by ORAN so far. The breadth of the use cases varied from demonstrating the open front hall interface between the DU and the RU units in the ORAN architecture to also demonstrating the O1 interface and the ORAN-defined SMO and their role in enabling vendor agnostic test gaps of RAN nodes. The first version of this ORAN plug-fest occurred in North America on December 5, 2019. This happened as a mix of both online participation as well as on-site demonstrations conducted at the open wireless lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The demonstrations were conducted by various companies including AT&T, Comsco, Ericsson, High Street Technologies, Nokia and Wipro. The companies demonstrated four use cases related to the ORAN-O1 interface and an ONAP-based service management and orchestration platform or the SMO. And the use case is focused on demonstrating the physical network function or PNF plug-and-play, bulk performance management data collection, RAN optimization use case related to PCI and RSI optimization, and also basic test gaps of 4G LTE small cells. And just a quick nod to the large number of members from all of the different companies that were behind making this plug-fest a great success with other contributions would not have been able to demonstrate the use cases successfully. So thank you to all of them. Now I will go ahead and introduce our panel members and that will lead us through today's discussion. First, we have Zak Lava from Comsco. He's a product night manager for small cells at Comsco and is responsible for the one-cell solution including service management and orchestration. We also have Ben Ching from Nokia who's a system architect in 5G Cloud RAN and ONAP and he's been working in the wireless industry for over 23 years and focuses on ONAP RAN use cases. We also have Mikayla Bevilakwa from Ericsson, who's a researcher in RAN standard and technology organization, and she represents Ericsson at ONAP for RAN-related topics. And finally we also have Haseeb Akhtar from Ericsson who's responsible for end-to-end network evolution at Ericsson and also represents Ericsson at ORAN Alliance's Working Group 1 which covers use cases and overall architecture. So now I will hand it off to Zak to lead us through the first demo. Zak? Yeah, hi everyone. Zak Lava here. For this plug fest, what we wanted to demonstrate was that legacy 4G devices implemented using 3GPP compliant data models could be adapted to follow an 01 compliant service management model. And this is really done in recognition that open RAN really needs to consider all aspects of the network. It's more than just about radios and it requires a uniform service management orchestration interfaces with an ability to also manage legacy devices. And for this demo we deployed a fully functional end-to-end setup at the Rutgers Open Wireless Lab. We used a mix of real and simulated one-cell C-RAN based band controller devices, each communicating to an instance of our TRO1 adapter. The adapter translates the protocols and data model parameters between the device and the OWNAP functions. And so from the perspective of OWNAP or from the service management orchestration layers, the adapter is essentially the device itself. And so next slide please. And so in this plug fest we demonstrated three OWN aligned use cases using OWNAP together with the TRO1 adapter. The first use case we demonstrated was a device initiated physical network function registration. This enables a new device to become known to the service management layer, thus enabling FCAPs for it. The basic flow is that the device will send the TR69 bootstrap to the adapter, which in turn translates that into a VEDS PNF registration message, which gets sent on to DCI-E. From there it gets forwarded to DMAP, the messaging interface. And from there SDNR then receives the notification. That closes the loop and now allows the remainder of the use cases to take place. The second use case was a demonstration of TR69 fault events being sent by the device with the adapter then generating a corresponding VEDS alarm. And then the VEDS alarm follows the exact same path through DCI-E to DMAP and ultimately where an SDNR is notified of the event, which can be observed through the ODLUX user interface. Lastly we demoed focusing on configuration management aspects. So with the adapter we provided Yang definitions that included the broadband forum TR181 and TR196 data models. And these are the same data models that were used by the device itself. These Yang models were in fact presented to SDNR by the adapter during the initial bootstrap and registration procedures. Using ODLUX we were then able to go into SDNR and trigger it to request the device to get parameter values for the device as well as the ability to edit or change the values on the device itself. These three essential use cases demonstrate that legacy LTE devices can be adapted to follow the O1-based management model. Now I'll hand it over to Ben who will share with you the details of Nokia's plug-and-play with Saun demo. Ben you're on mute. Sorry I'll be talking about plug-and-play in ONAP. It happens in five stages. It's been developed since the ONAP release to the Beijing release. In the first stage design time modeling happens where basically a user of ONAP can define the services that the service provider intends to use and defines the resources that are associated with those services. In stage two the services are instances of those services are created and basically that allows ONAP to declare that it needs and is expecting certain kinds of resources to connect to it. And then finally in stage three the PNF itself is delivered on site and powers up and then eventually sends a PNF registration VES event, virtual event streaming event over O1 through to the PRH, the PNF registration handler, where in stage four ONAP becomes aware essentially of that new PNF that's come online. And the PRH then takes that message, publishes it onto the internal messaging bus, the DMET bus. And the A&EI entry for that PNF can then be updated and this allows ONAP to recognize and then operate and do things with that PNF as it's officially now registered into A&EI. And also and finally in the stage five the PNF can be configured and activated. So the demo basically showed this flow of being able to recognize and go through the paces of PRH to show that ONAP can see and recognize a PNF. That's what was demoed. Okay, next. Another long-standing use case is the self-optimizing network and physical cell identifier. Use case led largely by AT&T but in collaboration with many others. The idea of self-optimizing networks is actually been around since 4G but largely will come to fruition in 5G where there are three principal main ideas, self-optimization, self-configuration and self-heal. So building more intelligence into the network and automation of control. And PCI is just one basic example of SON. An idea here is that cells within a wireless network are assigned PCI values and there's only a limited pool of PCI values are available. And you want to avoid collisions where neighboring cells have the same PCI value and confusion where adjacent cells have this exact same PCI value. So within ONAP there's a control loop that has been developed using OF, the optimization platform component within ONAP. It can evaluate policies and make decisions and send down new values to the RAN and then over 01 it can receive information from the RAN network that's then collected through the DCAE data collection analysis to look at the values that have been assigned in the network. So basically this demo demonstrates this one of the more interesting applications of SON. Hi everyone, I'm Nicola from Ericsson. The Ericsson demo, the first RAN plug-fax focused on ONEM interface used by the 5G RAN network function to interwork with the service management orchestrator implemented by ONAP. The demo has been performed from an Ericsson lab in Ireland where an ONAP allowed to release was installed to interwork with the real Ericsson GNOTB. We demonstrated the two use cases, plug-and-play and the above PM data collection. And with the help of ONAP it has been possible to show GNOTB event notification, configuration operation and data file transfer based on RAN alliance SON specification. To provide secure connection, TLS protocol has been used over the old interfaces. Next slide please. Let's have a look to the two use cases. On the left, the GNOTB auto discovery mechanism is shown. After the service and the resource instantiation in ONAP, a netconf young connection has been established with the network function using an ONAP controller workflow. ONAP CDS component has been used to execute a customer specific workflow through the STNC. And XNF will react to the netconf application configuration, choosing the registration event requested towards ONAP. On the right, you can see the other use case, the GNOTB data file collection. Ericsson has contributed to different microservices in ONAP, the PM mapper and the data file collector that are responsible of the collection of the file and the mapping of the PM counter on the events. PM data are then available over the DMAP bus, both as file and event. Next slide. I'll see you back to you. Thanks, Mikayla. Let's see from Ericsson here. So, as you can see that our contributions to ORA and OSC and ONAP, all of these open source forum, is helping to foster innovation across 5G. And in order to handle one of the key in a topic about sustainable business model related to open source, we have been engaged with the customers and partners and trying to jointly create a business model that would be beneficial for both the customers as well as for the suppliers. This type of events like podcast helps to drive towards that goal. We are also pushing the industry towards agile and faster development by participating in open source in general and in particular this podcast. And we hope to collaborate across all ecosystem players to achieve a global scale in developing open systems. Thank you everyone. That was a great presentation and thanks for the great overview. A lot of great progress made with this Blackfest. So before we have some question and answers, I want to pose a couple of questions to each of our members. So Zach, starting from you, can you please share some of the key lessons that you learned out of this Blackfest? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. What I'd say is, you know, the most interesting thing is that the devil is in the details. And as we went through this, there are a number of things that, you know, we discovered along the way and some of it may seem very basic. Oh, we're building an adapter and it converts one thing to another. But you get into little things like the different notions between what is a client and a server. And you end up having an adapter that needs to have two different server interfaces as opposed to just the simple protocol translation. And so it's only through real use cases and real world problems that we're able to uncover and find these sorts of issues. And what we found was that while, you know, ONAP had a reasonable level of maturity, that maturity didn't necessarily extend to every use case. And so as we're trying to build out these use cases, we're doing an environment where the standards are still being defined. A lot of the underlying technology is still being defined. The only way that you can sort it out is get all the stakeholders together and really execute these real test cases. And that I think was really exciting about this plug test. And I think the real value of the future plug test to come. Thank you. Ben, same question for you. Some of the key lessons learned from your perspective. Yeah, so I think one of the more interesting things is, you know, just watching a community of a diverse community of many companies come together to show something meaningful and useful. And ONAP has really been very interesting and amazing. I think it's one of the key lessons learned also is I think, you know, just to give us runway time to work out bugs and watching problems in the lab get resolved. You know, it does take time and always have a backup. So, you know, we had had many planning meetings and I think those have those helped the actual eventual plug fest go very smoothly. We had continued disease to for slides and demos and recording pre-recorded stuff. So I think that helped a lot. Great. And finally, Michaela, from your perspective, some of the key lessons. Yeah, when I like the engagement with people open source community will not be what is today without really the active participation of the people from the ground and skills. All of us has given feedbacks and helped one another in some really common problems. And the open discussion with the service provider and the vendor to understand the different perspectives, needs, priority are all very important. And it also provided the opportunity to explore new technology and innovate. And we see a coordinate effort across the remote standardization form and open source project, creating a sustainable environment. Thank you. So I guess, yeah, I think collaboration is the key and box and plug fest really help us to demonstrate right all the specifications and put together all the software. Now, I have one more question. Maybe, Zach, again, starting with you, can you give us any information about any future demonstrations that we can anticipate? You know, so one thing that we look to be supporting at the end of this year is a demonstration related to CBRF staff domain proxies. And that I largely be leveraging our CBRF devices for that activity. And then we're also looking at future use cases, kind of rounding out more FCABS functionality and more O1 interface capabilities. And we're really working closely with AT&T to see what we can best target for 2021 in that area. Thank you. Ben, how about from Nokia's perspective, what can we anticipate? So we're involved in, as with a lot of companies in the community, in a lot of the upcoming use cases I see are related around like end-to-end network slicing. There's a 3GPP own app and O-RAN alignment use cases like the standard defined VES notifications and A1 adapter extension policy extension use cases. So there's a lot of exciting stuff coming up. I think CMPV2, IPV6, Mdans, and Etsy, more Etsy use cases and enhanced software upgrade. So I expect to see a lot of interesting things. This is just the beginning really. And I think we'll see some interesting stuff coming down the pipe. Great. And Haseed, maybe from Eric's point of view, what can we anticipate in the near future? Yes. Thanks, Rob. I mean, as you all know that it has been a challenge to do face-to-face demonstrations due to COVID-19 implications. But having said that, you know, Ericsson has committed to participate in the virtual O-RAN Blackfest 2 at the end of this month. And we will be presenting three demos there. The first one is on A1 interface support in Genote B, leveraging a couple of Ericsson contributed OSC components, A1 adapter, and policy management service. The next demo is on PM counter management over O1 interface. And the third demo is on software upgrade also over O1 interface. And in addition to that, we are considering to participate in O-RAN sponsored Mobile World Congress North America's virtual demo at the end of October. And we're also hoping that the 2021 Mobile World Congress will have some level of face-to-face aspects and hopefully we'll be able to plan something like that. But stay tuned for it. Thank you. So great stuff to look forward to. And finally, quickly, I would call Tracy Van Braco from AP&T to give us a quick sneak peek on the second plug fest being organized by O-RAN Alliance. So the second plug fest is in multiple regions, North America, Europe, Asia, Japan and India. India is a newcomer. In North America, there will be two parts to this event or activity. Part one is it's a plug fest and workshops, as Hasid mentioned, mostly virtual on account of the COVID-19 crisis. And that's the end of this month. And I'm very pleased that both Ericsson and Nokia are bringing three scenarios each to share with the 5G LTE ecosystem. The second part of the POC plug fest in North America will coincide with the release of O-RAN Software Community Release Free. It's called the Cherry Release. And Zach, that's when we're eagerly anticipating the commscope CVRS-SAS, maybe with additional vendors contributing as well. I just want to thank everybody on the panel for collegiality, collaboration, and it's just so great to work with so many bright people who work together so well and who are so much fun. So see you at the next POC plug fest. Thanks, Tracy. And thank you to all our panel members for the great discussion and for the great overview. And now we can move on to the question and answer session. Thank you. Hello, everyone. We have now activated the phone bridge so the speakers can answer your questions live. Please enter your questions in the Q&A chat with speakers. Hi, this is Drew Gupta from AT&T. So I see a couple of questions here. So let me just quickly address those in terms of the duration of the plug fest. The first plug fest was conducted for one day in North America. Of course, the activities and the preparations for that began weeks to months ahead of time. And it was all the demo that occurred on the final day. Of course, the second plug fest is being conducted right now. And the total duration for that is actually two weeks. So it started last week and it's ongoing this week as well. And then also in terms of the reports from plug fest number two, so that's ongoing, like I said this week. So, you know, I'm sure we'll start seeing some reports and outcomes of that plug fest very soon as it wraps up later this week. So let me address some questions for speakers here. So maybe starting with Zach. Zach, could you maybe talk a little bit about how ComScope aligns across different open initiatives such as ORAN, OSB, ONAP. There are so many. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So ComScope is fully committed to open standards and in particular open RAN. So we're active in a number of working groups there. We're also active in the small cell forum. And we're also members of of course Linux Foundation and working in ONAP. And so we have a number of contributions that we've made and will continue to make. And, you know, we really see a lot of vibrant engagement in those forums. And I think it's really great to see it. And we are, you know, committed to continuing to support ORAN, ONAP, and so on. All right. Thank you. And I'll see if Mikaela has her audio. Then maybe Mikaela, do you want to also talk about how, from Eric's perspective, how do you balance across the multiple open initiatives that you're involved in? Do you hear me? Yeah. So the Open Source Alignment is key for Eric's. We are active in ORAN, Alliance, OSCE, and ONAP. We want to avoid fragmentation between open source initiative and we try to integrate the reuse of the common components. It's always a challenge because you risk that a different open initiative want to drive. As a company, we want to stimulate the interworking and we try to use the same thing as an open source active company. We encourage to have monthly meeting between the different open source initiatives and adopt meeting with the different open source initiatives and the key stakeholders. All right. Thank you. And maybe one more question here. So maybe Haseeb if you can help us with it. Can you talk about, you know, there is some obvious challenges that people talk about about the business model for open run systems and so on. So could you give a brief perspective on some of these challenges in making these open systems real? Thanks, Rup. So I think one of the key challenges to make open systems real is the lack of contributions and investment from the key stakeholders. What I mean by that is to really put up developers to do the real work, not just, you know, come up with the requirements and then just wait and see how it goes. Because without really serious participation and or investment, things will not move. The second one is, you know, sometimes there are too much focus on the processes. So, you know, processes are good when needed, but that could also create red tabs. So we believe that the release cycles are still too long. So something needs to be done on that. And then sometimes we are kind of, you know, very much attached to the not invented here mindset. So if I'm coming from on up and trying to do something in OSC or in or and then we try to bring our own kind of mindset to with it. So that also needs to be broadened. We need to look for the best solutions for the community. And then, as Michaela mentioned, lack of alignment across projects within the initiative itself and also with other related initiatives should be addressed. And finally, open does not necessarily mean free. So we have to also examine as an industry on that concept and must develop a viable open based business model by addressing some of these concerns. So I think that's that's how I like that. All right. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you. We're at time so I'm going to go ahead and end the webcast here shortly but you can continue the discussion on the Slack channel. Stephanie, do you have the name of that Slack channel? Yes, I posted it in the chat. It is the number two AI networking edge ran channel. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you everybody. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you all.