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Organization Mgmt, Sales Strategies - (It is suggested that you use the following wording): There is no additional organizational management or sales strategies for this use case outside of a service providers "normal" ONAP deployment and its attendant organizational resources from a service provider. (This would typically describe the "WHO", but because use cases are all deployed with ONAP itself, these two areas come with the actual ONAP deployment and uses the organizational management and sales strategies of a particular service provider's ONAP deployment)

DEVELOPMENT IMPACTS

List of PTLs:Approved Projects

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ONAP needs to review work of O-RAN teams on A-1 Definition.  Document to will be available in September.  Additionally, OSC (O-RAN Software Community) has been launched April 2019 to realize O-RAN architecture. Frankfurt release must at minimum architect the incorporation of the interface into ONAP and prototype. In this section, we want to keep up-to-dated plan and information on resources relevant to A1 in different communities.  

A1 specs in O-RAN

O-RAN WG2 (https://oranalliance.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/NonRTRIC/overview) defines both Non-RT (Real Time) RIC and A1. Text in the project overview says Non-RT RIC supports non-real-time intelligent radio resource management, higher layer procedure optimization, policy optimization in RAN and providing AI/ML models to near RT RIC and other RAN functions. A1 interface supports communication & information exchange between Orchestration/NMS layer containing non-RT RIC and eNB/gNB containing near-RT RIC. Key functions of A1 interface include support for policy-based guidance of near-RT RIC functions/use-cases, providing enrichment data to near-RT RIC, and feedback mechanisms from near-RT RIC to ensure SLAs.

O-RAN WG2 plans to release the first A1 specs September 2019. ONAP will need to adopt those A1 specs, which will include both the application protocol and transport protocol aspects.

Relevant development in OSC

Release A (the first release of OSC) is targeted for December 2019. OSC projects include A1-relevant projects such as Non RT RIC (https://wiki.o-ran-sc.org/display/RICNR/Non+real+time+RIC)  and A1 mediator (https://wiki.o-ran-sc.org/display/RICP/A1+Mediator).

The scope of Non RT RIC project includes A1 peer in orchestration layer. Generally, ONAP is not the only platform desirable for Non RT RIC in OSC. However, they are planning to use ONAP El Alto as a base platform for release A.  The scope of release A in Non RT RIC project has not been finalized as of July 2019. General consensus for now is that release A’s scope would not be gating and release B will be their primary target.

Even though O-RAN WG2 has not finished its specs of A1, OSC RIC project already started implementation including A1 mediator. A1 mediator is a RIC component which plays as a single entry peer of A1 to RIC. Here is gerrit repo of A1 mediator: https://gerrit.o-ran-sc.org/r/admin/repos/ric-plt/a1. A1 mediator supports RESTful interface as a policy-syntax agnostic transport of policy.

From OSC to ONAP

Since Non RT RIC project in OSC is planning to use ONAP as a base platform for orchestration layer with A1 scoped in, we will need a plan to ingest OSC code to ONAP. Since A1 implementation in Non RT RIC project is not yet finalized as of July 2019. We need to keep track of the progress in such area.

Impacted systems

SDN-C:  Implement southbound adaption layer to communicate with Near-Real Time RIC using A1 specified protocol (most likely Rest) and encoding.

CDS: Expand CDS to design intent based policy configuration to send to Near-Real Time RIC using A1 interface.

Recommendations on Prioritization:

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