An Overview of User Services Platform (TR-369)

The TR-369 User Services Platform (USP) is an upgrade of the TR-069 platform that was introduced by the Broadband Forum back in 2004. This has provided a standard for telcos and services providers when it comes to Device Lifecycle Management and has more than one billion deployments.

USP/TR-369 – User Services Platform

Building on the experience and knowledge gained from the past with the Broadband Forum TR-069, the TR-369 platform provides greater speed and flexibility in terms of catering to existing use cases of TR-069. Some of the capabilities this platform offers are:

Managed Wi-Fi

Today’s service providers are reliant on managed Wi-Fi systems, and USP is perfect for building these. This is done through flexible transport mechanics, Wi-Fi management objects that are standardized, and multi-control architecture.

Bulk Statistics Collection

With these platforms, users can develop applications to collect information that enables mass processing of data, machine learning, and AI. It is ideal for the collection of bulk statistics.

Standardised IoT Onboarding

Another thing that the platform is ideal for is standardizing IoT onboarding. It brings together smart home devices and the IoT environment through the use of non-IP protocols, onboarding and managing the lifecycle of devices, and ensuring IoT interfaces and service objects are standardized.

Customer Self-Care Applications

USP controllers can be created to enable customers to self-care without relying on cloud resources. These controllers can be used with end-user devices to create customer self-care applications.

Application Enabled Smart Gateways

The features of the TR-069 that allow for software module management are extended and enhanced by this USP. This allows for ‘dockerized’ management of devices and also for the lifecycle management of third-party applications such as parental controls and security.

Secure Communication

Another thing this USP offers is end-to-end application-layer TLS connections for all applications, so users can benefit from secure communication.

Open Source USP Agent

An open-source USP Agent is maintained by the Broadband Forum, and developers can base their implementations on this. This is something that has been released and re-released, which results in regular improvements. Implementers will find that this is an excellent place to start when it comes to creating a complete solution and using CDRouter to test it.

Protocol Stack

USP Protocol

USP messages are all stored in a USP record, and these can ensure the integrity of the messages which means a valuable extra layer of security when this cannot be established at the message transport layer. These records enable an optional Session Context, and this allows for protected messages and for large USP messages to be segmented and reassembled.

Message Transport Agnostic

TR-069 is linked strongly to HTTP, and the design of the USP has been geared toward making sure the protocol is layered cleanly to ensure USP messages can be transported over multiple ‘transports’. Message Transfer Protocols for USP 1.1 include CoAP, (Constrained Application Protocol), Simple Text-Oriented Messaging Protocol Message Queueing Telemetry Transport, and WebSockets over HTTP.

Protocol Buffers Encoding

USP uses protocol buffers rather than sending XML documents via HTTP. This enables the encoding of messages in transport. This type of encoding is binary, and it can result in a lot of space being saved, among other benefits.

To learn more about TR-369, head to Axiros for more information.