Attendees & Representation

TAC Members and Project representatives should mark their attendance below

Agenda

• Check Action Items & Topic Requests (Backlog)

• O-RAN Alliance Open Source Focus Group and Network Energy Savings (Test Case 17)

• AI Observability Working Group Update

• Security Mailing List Audit

• Any Other Topics

O-RAN Alliance Open Source Focus Group and Network Energy Savings

• Tracy van Brakle (WINLAB, Rutgers University), with support from N.K. Shankaranarayanan, presented an update on the O-RAN Alliance Open Source Focus Group and the network energy savings work.

• The Open Source Focus Group adopted a new charter at the end of 2025. Its focus is defining open source strategies for the O-RAN Alliance and engaging directly with open source communities, letting O-RAN Alliance operator members prioritize the Working Group 1 use cases and doing rapid prototyping with LFN artifacts. The group also intends to provide written feedback to the O-RAN Alliance working groups on published draft specifications, many of which are currently underspecified or ambiguous from an implementation perspective.

• Two demonstrations have been completed at O-RAN Alliance face-to-face meetings this year. The Rome demo (February) implemented the basic network energy saving use case with open source components. The Seattle demo (June) packaged that work as an open source reference design and showed it could be reproduced remotely across testbeds: the software stack resided at the University of New Hampshire, the radio at WINLAB, and a DU in Latvia, with the DU containerized, the CU and SMO on Kubernetes, and the whole deployment driven by an Ansible playbook. This demonstrated that labs with only open source software can run meaningful experiments against expensive equipment hosted elsewhere.

• The longer-term goal is a library of open source reference designs closely allied with the LFN Super Blueprint, making these designs downloadable and reproducible by testbeds and labs worldwide.

• The next step is a more sophisticated network energy saving demonstration at the O-RAN Alliance face-to-face in Hanoi, Vietnam, in the second half of 2026, structured as a new test case (Test Case 17) with AI enablement. Test Case 17 has been accepted by the O-RAN Alliance Testing and Integration Focus Group and is within scope of the NTIA Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund testing and evaluation initiative.

• The technical motivation: current energy efficiency testing measures aggregated, time-averaged KPIs (energy over a window, data delivered, their ratio, and PRB utilization). Averaging destroys the temporal information needed to understand scheduler behavior, so two systems with identical KPIs can consume very different amounts of energy. A parallel track of four scheduler-visibility KPIs is proposed to address this blind spot. Testing with open source CU/DU components makes behavior visible that cannot be observed with proprietary black-box base stations.

• Discussion feedback: lead future presentations with the business case (the magnitude of operator energy spend and cost impact) before the technical detail, position the work as test-driven development that operators can use to push requirements to their suppliers, and add a timeline slide showing the evolution from Rome to Seattle to Hanoi.

• The reference design documentation packaged by Lincoln Lavoie has not yet landed in the Super Blueprint library. A working session between the Open Source Focus Group contributors and the Super Blueprint team will be arranged to review the package and get it into the library.

• The ONE Summit call for papers is expected to open within days, and this topic is a strong fit for submission.

AI Observability Working Group Update

• Verizon has accepted the invitation to participate in the AI observability work, with an official confirmation email to follow.

• A kickoff meeting invitation has been sent for Friday.

Security Mailing List Audit

• Tony Hansen shared a lesson learned from a recent security report in one of ONAP's sub-projects. While handling the report, an audit of the security mailing list found the list owner was a former LF employee whose ownership had never rolled over, and several list members were no longer active in the community. LF staff retain admin access to all project mailing lists and review them regularly, so no reports went unhandled; the issue was list membership, not moderation.

• ONAP plans to update its vulnerability management policy to require a yearly review of the security list membership.

• All projects are encouraged to audit who receives their security reports and, more broadly, to review the membership of their committee mailing lists. If an active committee member is missing from a list, reach out to them directly. The Zulip platform, available to everyone with an LFID, is another channel for community communication (though not for security reporting).

Action Items