Co-written by Sonya Goodanetz
Welcome to Incognito Software Systems Inc's USP Blog Series! In part 1 we’ll cover what USP is and the drivers behind this latest standard.
Stay tuned for blog parts on USP use cases addressing:
USP (User Services Platform) is an industry-standard protocol developed by Broadband Forum to manage the lifecycle of TR-369 compliant devices.
TR-069 is the precursor standards-based protocol from Broadband Forum. USP represents the next generation of TR-069 and leverages over 10 years of global deployments spanning over 1 billion devices.
Device provisioning has changed significantly since TR-069 was first developed for gateway routers in 2002. New functionality has been added to TR-069 since its initial launch to now support devices such as fiber ONTs, STB (Set-Top Boxes), VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), fixed-LTE, DSL, and Wi-Fi.
Emerging use case applications, virtualization technologies, and the proliferation of devices with the rise of IoT (Internet of Things) have driven the evolution of TR-069.
Yes – due to the backward compatibility support designed within USP, both TR-069 and USP devices will be able to co-exist within the same deployment.
A USP agent runs on a client CPE device and publishes to USP Controller Service Elements represented within its data model. The agent runs on CPE hardware directly or virtualized within a CPE container environment powered by device management software.
A USP controller manages a set of service elements represented in a USP agent’s data model. A USP controller database contains all agents within a deployment, capturing states and capabilities, and helps instantiate use cases changes (these will be explored in subsequent blog posts).
When a new vendor is deployed within USP, the vendor access can be constrained to specific areas of a USP agent (e.g. vendor 1 to manage Wi-Fi and vendor 2 to manage VoIP).
USP implements always-on communication which significantly reduces the number of messages sent across a network compared to TR-069. Binary data encoding using protocol buffers and relative path usage significantly decreases the size of messages that are sent across the network, compared to sending XML documents over HTTP/HTTPS in TR-069, which increased the message size.
Within the connected home, there are several use cases for virtualized application deployment which is explored further in part 3 of our USP blog series:
USP (TR-369) is the evolution of the TR-069 standard, providing superior network performance, security, virtualized applications, and device scaling in multi-vendor, IoT-ready connected home environments.
Read part 2 of our USP blog series which explores the use case of managed Wi-Fi.
Incognito surveyed telecom executives to explore what's driving interest in TR-369 USP and what the top use cases are. View the results.