2019 Community Coordinator Election Candidates

I have been with AT&T for more than 33 years, supporting OSS architecture work. I have been working with AT&T 5G Network Architects, Vendors, and external communities to define Management Architecture for 5G network including slicing for more than two years.  I actively participated with X-RAN and contributed in defining O-RAN network and management architecture.  I continue to actively participate in various O-RAN working groups, defining management and RIC (RAN Intelligent Controller) architecture.

I was the lead architect of AT&T ECOMP and have been active participation in ONAP architecture and use-case subcommittee. I worked with community members proposed 5G use in Beijing release and continue to lead that group.

I would like to coordinate and lead 5G work within ONAP by actively working with external communities such as O-RAN, 3GPP, and other committees with ONAP (Modeling, Security, etc.)

I have 20+ years of product strategy and architecture experience in Enterprise, Cloud & Telecom industry and in the last few years pioneered the Telco NFV movement chairing the NFV Research Group at IETF. I am currently at VMware where I lead ONAP strategy/architecture and Cloud Native/Edge technology strategy/architecture. I have a deep understanding of various technologies and I drove a differentiated SDN product initiative winning the ONS 2014 SDN Idol award for Brocade. I am a recognized innovator with 19 US patents, 8 IEEE conference papers with a best paper award.

I have been deeply involved in ONAP since its inception with key contributions in the following areas. First, Architecture, Use Cases and Functional Requirements for Cloud and Edge Computing. Next, external open source project representation for Edge Computing. Last, committer for OOF project.

Currently, I am leading the Edge Computing efforts in ONAP which includes working with ONAP subcommittees such as Use Case, Architecture and external open source projects such as Akraino etc. (Links: https://wiki.onap.org/display/DW/Edge+Automation+through+ONAP; https://wiki.onap.org/display/DW/Edge+Automation+through+ONAP+Arch.+Task+Force+-+Distributed+Management+%28ONAP+etc.%29+components). I would like to continue to coordinate and lead Edge Computing work within ONAP by actively working with external open source & standards initiatives such as LF Edge (Akraino etc.), ETSI MEC, Kubernetes IoT/Edge WG etc. and other committees within ONAP such as Architecture, Modelling, Use Case, Security etc.

I have worked in telco research, development and standards space over 20+ years. I have been involved in SDN and NFV space from the early days of their inception with the emphasis on network infrastructure cloudification and on providing network as a service capability in the mobile carrier space. I have also worked heavily on data-driven network management and optimization. I accumulated unique perspectives from my current and past employments on the vendor side (Huawei, Argela), carrier side (NTT DOCOMO) and academic side (Ozyegin University, The University of Maryland, The George Washington University).  

On the open source side, I have been an active participant in telco focused open source activities.  I am quite familiar with the community, processes and activities in LFN projects, particularly of ONAP and OPNFV projects. I have been involved in ONAP specifically on the 5G use case activities since early 2018. I have been leading the discussions on PNF software management with feature contributions to Casablanca and Dublin releases. I served as PTL for the OPNFV Domino project that focused on template distribution and translation services for network service and VNF descriptors. On the standards side, I work very closely with team members who are major contributors to 3GPP, IETF, ETSI and IEEE standards.

I have a track record of over 65 IEEE and ACM publications (with 2 best paper awards), 17 issued US Patents, 2 books and a book chapter on communication networks, cloud computing/storage and distributed systems. I served in organizing committees and technical program committees in flagship IEEE and ACM conferences including IEEE Infocom, IEEE NFV-SDN, IEEE ICC, IEEE PIMRC, IEEE Globecom, ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc, ACM Mobisys. I served in project review panels for NSF GENI. I am an area editor for Elsevier COMNET. I served as reviewer for various IEEE transactions and journals numerous times. I am a senior member of IEEE.

I envision great opportunities in ONAP to apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for achieving automation and zero touch capabilities for network operations.

Because, I coordinated the AI efforts in Acumos, O-RAN RIC open source projects which will align eventually with ONAP, I am very aware of the commitment that this role requires in terms of collaboration, standards, and architecture recommendations. Also, I presented a talk in recent ONS unconference sessions about integrating AI/ML models into ONAP and seen lot of synergies in ONAP use cases to leverage existing AI open source projects.

My interest in serving this position has much to do with my professional and technical foci. I believe, I can coordinate the designs and architecture needed to streamline and deliver the AI specific goals in the ONAP community.

• AI(ML/DL)

• 5G

Before joining ONAP, I have been working as SDO representative in ITU, IETF, 3GPP and ETSI NFV. Personally, I am quite familiar with both the SDO and Open Source cultures.

As one of the basic principles, China Mobile has been investing in both fronts (SDO and Open Source) to unify the industry standards and its open source reference implementation. As part of this efforts, China Mobile is currently serving as the Vice Chairmen of the Board (at LFN) for SDO and Open Source collaboration. To guide the related efforts, we led the  analysis and documentation on the ONAP status on SDO collaboration. For mobile network automation, our ONAP team has been focusing on contributing to ONAP the code base for supporting both ETSI NFV compliant NFV use cases (VoLTE, vCPE) and TMF/MEF compatible use cases (CCVPN).  For intelligent operation, we are contributing datalake and building intelligent operation applications based on our internal AI platform, which is also hosting the nation AI competition in China.

Internally, I have been working extensively on NFV orchestration, slicing management, and intelligent operation use cases based on ONAP,  which is being done hand-in-hand with the China Mobile 3GPP delegation (which is currently leading 5G SBA architecture design and NWDAF (network data analytics function), and the China Mobile O-RAN delegation (which is leading the O-RAN architecture design and intelligent RAN operation applications).  

• Network Management

As the ex-SDO coordinator, we have organized 4 times Multi-SDO ONAP workshop before:

External SDOs session in Developer event in September

External SDO session in ONAP Forum Dec. 12th, 2017

Jan 2019 ONAP DDF OPNFV Plugfest SDO

Apr. 2019 ONAP M-SDOs workshop

Based on my past experience of network management , I am willing to continue to help on those topics, and bring the connections between ONAP with those SDOs.

I have 15+ years of networking, orchestration and automation experience in Enterprise, Cloud & Telecom industry. I have been Orange head delegate at MEF forum for several years .

I developed OSS services (network equipment configurator) and commercial softwares.

I was involved in Orange first SDN/NFV business solution (https://www.orange-business.com/en/products/easy-go-network).

I have been deeply involved in ONAP for almost two years with focus on integration testing (OOM gating), container footprint optimization and use case development.

As such, I am contributing to ONAP helm charts integrated in OOM and automation strategy. I am also working on the Kubernetes infrastructure targeted by Orange for its future cloud ready VNFs.

I am involved on the definition of new networking paradigms such as service meshes, as well as kubernetes operators for Telcos.

I think that there are a lot of valuable LF projects in CNCF that could greatly simplify the ONAP architecture, implementation and automation processes.

I then would like to coordinate ONAP Cloud Native activities for the community with the other partners of the ecosystems (CNCF, standardization initiatives and other open source communities).

Xinhui Li has 13+ years’ experience at Cloud Computing and is Senior Architect in VMware for Hybrid Cloud and MEC (Multi-access edge computing). She is a voting member of ETSI NFV and member of ETSI MEC ISG. She is leading across-cloud Disaster Recovery in CCVPN use case of ONAP. She once served as ONAP TSC (Technique Steering Committee) member representing VMware and served as OPENO TSC representative. She served as the PTL (Project Technique Leader) of Multi-Cloud project in ONAP for the first two releases and tightly cooperating with different projects/groups to identify the scope/interfaces. She is taking PTL in Akraino for traffic steering optimization on Hybrid Cloud Architecture. Besides the product/Integration delivery, she is a core developer of OpenStack community and a primary driver to Senlin, an official project for clustering management/elasticity/self-remediation, in the past OpenStack releases. She has 14 patents, published 4 industry white papers, and 8 academy papers in international PIC top/target level journals/conferences. She delivered more than 20 technique presentations on open Networking Summit (ONS) Events, OpenStack Summit, OPNFV Summit, ONAP Summit, Hadoop summit, and Company Events.

I am having 22 years of an experience in Telecom Industry and worked with various telecom service providers, including Ericsson, Virgin Media, Optus, Digicel-Jamaica, all over world.

Specialization in Service Fulfillment and Service Assurance for various network and many more