WAP

From Isopedia

WAP or Wireless Application Protocol is an open international standard for applications that use wireless communication. Its principal application is to enable access to the Internet from a mobile phone or PDA. A WAP browser is to provide all of the basic services of a computer based web browser but simplified to operate within the restrictions of a mobile phone.



Contents

Beginnings of Wireless Application Protocol: The WAP Forum

In February 1998, the founding members of WAP forum published the first draft of the WAP specification. The Goal of WAP Forum is to bring together companies for creating a global wireless protocol specification which will operate both with differing types of wireless devices and network technologoies. It was established in 1997 by Ericsson, Motorala, Nokia, and Unwired Planet and now has over 90 members, which together represent over 90% of the global handset market.

The objectives of WAP Forum are:
- To bring Internet content and advanced data services to digital ceullular phones and other wireless terminals
- To create a global wireless protocol specification that will work across differing wireless network technologies
- To enable the creation of content and applications that scale across a very wide range of bearer networks and device types
- To embrace and extend existing standards and technology wherever appropriate

After publishing the first draft, WAP Forum held many open meetings to discuss the draft specification. The completed WAP version 1.0 specification is based on proposals suggested in meetings held in Miami and Tokyo, as well as feedback recieved via the WAP web site. Now the finalized version 1.0 specification is available via the WAP Forum web site with proposals for version 1.1. The WAP Forum has since consolidated (along with many other forums of the industry) into OMA (Open Mobile Alliance), which covers virtually everything in future development of wireless data services


Technical Specifications 

| Wireless Application Environment (WAE)   |   
+------------------------------------------+  \
| Wireless Session Protocol (WSP)          |   |
+------------------------------------------+   |
| Wireless Transaction Protocol (WTP)      |   | WAP
+------------------------------------------+   | protocol
| Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS) |   | suite
+------------------------------------------+   |
| Wireless Datagram Protocol (WDP)         |   |
+------------------------------------------+  /
|     *** Any Wireless Data Network ***    |
+------------------------------------------+


Wireless Application Environment (WAE)

This is the top level and in this space, application-specific markup languages are defined. The main language of the WAE is WML, which stands for Wireless Markup Language, this was designed from scratch for handheld devices, especially cell phones.

Wireless Session Protocol (WSP)

WSP is best thought of as a smaller version of HTTP. This protocol allows a terminal to send requests that have an HTTP or HTTPS equivalent to a WAP "gateway"; the gateway translates requests into plain HTTP.

Wireless Transaction Protocol (WTP)

WTP is a source of transaction support that is adapted to the wireless world. WTP is more supportive than TCP in regards to the problem of packet loss, which is common in 2G wireless technologies in most radio conditions, but is mistaken by TCP as network congestion.

Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS)

WTLS provides a public-key cryptography-based security mechanism that is similar to TLS. The use of WTLS is optional however.

Wireless Datagram Protocol (WDP)

WDP is the last protocol, WDP which is an adaptation layer that makes every data network look a little like UDP to the upper layers by providing unreliable transport of data with two 16-bit port numbers. WDP is considered by all the upper layers as one and the same protocol, which has several "technical realizations" on top of other "data bearers" such as SMS, and USSD. On different IP bearers such as GPRS, UMTS packet-radio service, or PPP on top of a circuit switched data connection, WDP is pretty much exactly like UDP.

WAP In the Commercial Realm

Early Shortcomings

WAP was hyped at the time of its introduction, leading users to expect WAP to have the performance of the Web. In terms of speed, ease of use, appearance, and interoperability, the reality fell short of expectations. This led many people to refer to WAP with phrases such as "Worthless Application Protocol" and "Wait And Pay".

Critics advanced several explanations for the early failure of WAP:

- The idiosyncratic WML language cut users off from true HTML sites, leaving severely limited content for WAP users to access. It can, however, be argued that only custom-designed web content could be supported by the technology at the time of WAP's release

- Under-specification of terminal requirements meant that compliant devices would not necessarily interoperate properly. This resulted in great variability in the actual behavior of phones. For example, some phone models would not accept even small pages and some even crashed often. The user interface of devices was also underspecified,, as accesskeys (e.g., the ability to press '4' to access directly the fourth link in a list) were variously implemented depending on phone models.

- Early WAP terminals only had a few buttons and small black and white screens and thus were not very apt at presenting large amounts of information to their user, which compounded the other problems: one would have to be extra careful in designing the user interface on such a resource-constrained device.

- Existing development kits did not did not provide the capability to allow content providers to easily publish content that would interoperate seamlessly with many phone models. Compared to developing on the web, WAP development is much more difficult because of the requirements of WML specifications, the variability in terminals, and the demands of testing on various wireless terminals, along with the lack of widely available desktop authoring and eumlation tools, considerably lengthened the time required to complete most projects

Later Successes

WAP has enjoyed much success in Japan. While the largest operator NTT DoCoMo uses its own system imode instead of WAP, rival operators KDDI and Vodafone Japan have both been successful with the WAP technologoy. After being shadowed by the initial success of i-mode, the two smaller operators have been gaining market share from DoCoMo since spring 2001. Korea is also leading the world in providing advanced WAP services. According to the Mobile Data Association, June 2004 saw a considerable increase of 42% in its recorded number of WAP pages viewed compared with the same period in 2003. WAP is now the protocol used for the majority of the world's mobile internet sites, known as WAP sites. The i-mode system is currently the only other major competing wireless data protocol. Prior to the introduction of WAP, service providers had extremely limited oppurtunities to offer interactive data services. Now, Interactive data applications support now commonplace activities such as:

- email by phone
- trading of stock market prices
- sports results
- checking back accounts
- news headlines
- music downloads

Sources

Team Members

Jacob Rubbo
Kevin Love
Reineer Terwindt
Joseph Schoonbeek
Andrew DiMiceli

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