Broadband Forum’s New Connected Home Standard: OB-USP-Agent - ETI
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March 11, 2022

Broadband Forum’s New Connected Home Standard: OB-USP-Agent

Broadband Forum has made available the Open Broadband-USP-Agent (OB-USP-Agent), the fifth release of the organization’s connected home standard. The organization says that the focus of the release is increased ecosystem interoperability, platform integration, and functionality.

The OB-USP Agent supports version 1.2 of the User Services Platform (USP) standard – USP/TR-369 – which is being developed by device and infrastructure vendors and operators. At this point, 20 organizations are working on the project.

OB-USP Agent

“OB-USP-Agent combines the latest open-source software with standards to increase the number of USP deployments and ensure interoperability in the connected home,” Broadband Forum Chairman and OB-USP-Agent Project Leader John Blackford said in a press release. “Our latest release incorporates the final unimplemented USP Message Transfer Protocol and highlights the importance of our project work, bringing together collaborators from across the broadband industry. This continues to prove the quality of USP as it supports future standards development and ensures a greater level of device management.”

The OB-USP-Agent is a convergence of management planes that are generic but also extensible and reliable, IOPSYS Lead Architect – Device Management Vivek Dutta said in the press release.

The OB-USP-Agent release – also known as The Eagle release — completes support for USP message transfer protocols (MTP) with the implementation of the WebSocket MTP. MTPs specify how one USP endpoint establishes a connection to another and define a common language to enable the USP endpoints to communicate.

The support of WebSocket MTP means that all defined USP MTPs are supported, Dutta said.

The group already is working on the next release, version 1.2 of the USP, which is known as the Falcon release. The goals are to enable the open-source community to keep pace with the latest version of the USP specification and to add features to the end-to-end message exchange security mechanism to ensure a more secure ESP Agent.

The Broadband Forum has projects that touch on 5G, connected home, cloud, and access worldwide.