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... The Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) is one such revolutionary technology that is heralding sweeping changes in the fields of Telecommunications and Information Technology.
WHAT IS WAP? ...
WAP defines a communications protocol as well as an application environment. ... WAP, infact, is very similar to the combination of HTML and HTTP except that it adds in one very important feature: optimization for low-bandwidth, low-memory, and low-display capability environments. ...
WAP is the gateway to a new world of mobile data. ...
The WAP standard is based on Internet standards (HTML, XML and TCP/IP). ...
THE WAP FORUM:
WAP, the standard for wireless information and telephony services on digital Mobile phones and other wireless terminals, was invented and driven by WAP forum - a group founded by Nokia, Ericsson, Phone. ... The WAP Forum’s membership roster now includes computer industry heavyweights such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Intel along with several hundred other companies, that add up to a total of more than 280.
WAP Forum members represent over 95% of the global handset market, carriers with more than 100 million subscribers, leading infrastructure providers, software developers and other organizations providing solutions to the wireless industry.
The primary objective of the WAP Forum is to bring together companies from all segments of the wireless industry value chain to ensure product interoperability and growth of wireless market.
According to the WAP Forum, the goals of WAP are to be:
· Independent of wireless network standard. ...
As part of the Forum’s goals, WAP will also be accessible to (but not limited to) the following:
· GSM-900, GSM-1800, GSM-1900
· CDMA IS-95
· TDMA IS-136
· 3G systems - IMT-2000, UMTS, W-CDMA, Wideband IS-95
PHILOSOPHY:
The Wireless Application Protocol takes a client server approach. ... This makes WAP suitable for thin clients and early smart phones. WAP puts the intelligence in the WAP Gateways whilst adding just a micro browser to the mobile phones themselves. ... com (formerly Unwired Planet) on the board of the WAP Forum commented "The philosophy behind Wireless Application Protocols approach is to utilize as few resources as possible on the handheld device and compensate for the constraints of the device by enriching the functionality of the network". ...
Indeed, the importance of WAP can be found in the fact that it provides an evolutionary path for application developers and network operators to offer their services on different network types, bearers and terminal capabilities.
The design of the WAP standard separates the application elements from the bearer being used. ... WAP has been designed to work with all cellular standards and is supported by major worldwide wireless leaders such as AT&T Wireless and NTT DoCoMo. ...
WAP – A HOT TOPIC?
WAP is a hot topic that has been widely hyped in the mobile industry and outside of it. WAP is hot for several reasons:
· It provides a standardized way of linking the Internet to mobile phones, thereby linking two of the hottest industries anywhere. ...
· By April 2000, the WAP Forum had over 350 member companies.
Mobile information services, a key application for WAP, have not been as successful as many network operators expected. WAP is seen as a way to rectify this situation.
DETRACTORS AND CONTROVERSIES:
WAP also has its detractors and controversies:
· It is very difficult to configure WAP phones for new WAP services, with 20 or so different parameters needing to be entered to gain access to a WAP service.
· Compared with the installed base of Short Message Service (SMS) compliant phones, the relative number of handsets supporting WAP is tiny. WAP is a protocol that runs on top of an underlying bearer. None of the existing GSM bearers for WAP- the Short Message Service (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD) and Circuit Switched Data (CSD) are optimized for WAP.
· The WAP standard is incomplete, with key elements such as Push (proactive sending of information to mobile devices) and wireless telephony (updating address reports and the like) included in the WAP 1. ...
· There are many WAP Gateway vendors out there competing against each other with largely the same standardized product. ...
· Other protocols such as SIM Application Toolkit and Mobile Station Application Execution Environment (MexE) are respectively already widely supported or designed to supercede WAP.
· WAP services are expected to be expensive to use since the tendency is to be on-line for a long Circuit Switched Data (CSD) call as features such as interactivity and selection of more information are used by the end user. Without specific tariff initiatives, there are likely to be some surprised WAP users when they see their mobile phone bill for the first time after starting using WAP.
APPLICATIONS:
WAP is being used to develop enhanced forms of existing applications and new versions of todays applications.
Existing mobile data software and hardware supplies are adding WAP support to their offering, either by developing their own WAP interface or more usually partnering with one of the WAP Gateway suppliers profiled above. WAP is also given a significant impetus for new players to add mobile as a new distribution channel for their existing products and services- for example, CNN and Nokia teamed up to offer CNN Mobile and Reuters and Ericsson teamed up to provide Reuters Wireless Services. ... This is part of the business case for network operators- by making the value-added services more easily to reply to and request (using menus instead of keywords, for example), WAP can help generate additional traffic on the network and therefore revenue. ... By separating the bearer from the application, WAP facilitates easy migration of applications between networks and bearers. As such, WAP is similar to Java in that it simplifies application development. ...
Corporate applications that are being enhanced and enabled with a WAP interface include:
· Job Dispatch
· Remote Point Of Sale
· Customer Service
· Remote Monitoring Such As Meter Reading
· Vehicle Positioning
· Corporate Email
· Remote LAN Access
· File Transfer
· Web Browsing
· Document Sharing/ Collaborative Working
· Audio
· Still Images
· Moving Images
· Home Automation
Consumer Applications that are being enhanced and enabled with a WAP interface include:
· Simple Person to Person Messaging
· Voice and Fax Mail Notifications
· Unified Messaging
· Internet Email
· Prepayment
· Ringtones
· Mobile Commerce
· Affinity Programs
· Mobile Banking
· Chat
· Information Services
EFFECT ON INTERNET:
WAP provides a platform to re-engineer the existing Internet applications, enhance them with personalization and broadcasting features, and deliver the contents on the new wireless device. In the near future, a number of home devices such as televisions are expected to get WAP enabled to facilitate Internet interaction from simple devices, rather than from computers. ... WAP empowers the mobile phone with capabilities to conduct business from anywhere, anytime with the required security and ease of access. ... WAP will form basic core technology that will direct this future application.
WAP Internet applications may be roughly divided into two categories: The first type of applications does not require large data to be transferred between the application server and the client, and it can easily be implemented on the relatively smaller display screens associated with the mobile wireless devices. ...
THE WAP PROTOCOL STACK:
The WAP stack was derived from and inherited most of the characteristics of, the ISO OSI reference model. The main difference between the two is the number of layers: WAP has just five layers, while the OSI model has seven of them.
The WAP layers can also be compared to the web protocol stack used in the web model. There are of course strong similarities between the two; the main difference being the compactness and lightness of the WAP protocols. ...
WAP is based on layered architecture as mentioned below:
Ø Application Layer:
Wireless Application Environment (WAE) provides an application environment intended for the development and execution of portable applications and services. ...
Ø Transport Layer:
Wireless Data gram Protocol (WDP) is the bottom layer of the WAP stack, which shelters the upper layers from the bearer services offered by the operator. ...
WAP Protocol Stack
WIRELESS APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT (WAE):
The application layer of WAP provides an environment that includes all the elements related to the development and execution of applications. ... All the browsers message editors, and phonebooks contained in WAP devices can vary greatly while still complying with the specifications. ...
Beginning with WAP 1.2, there will also be another scenario: it will be possible to push content towards a WAP client without any request made by the client. ...
With WML, WAP takes a step backwards in time to the old system. ... When the user accesses a WAP site, it sends back a deck; the user is shown the first card, reads the content, possibly can enter some information, and then moves to another card, the choices of which is dependent on the user’s actions. ... These can be linked to HTTP client headers and can, for example, be used by the server to retrieve the type of user agent within the WAP client. ... WTP, as all the other layers in WAP, is optimized to adapt to small bandwidth of the radio interface, trying to reduce the total amount of replayed transactions between the client and server. ...
WIRELESS TRANSPORT LAYER SECURITY – WTLS:
WTLS is the solution to the security issue provided by WAP Forum. ...
It should be obvious that WAP also had to adapt to this situation, by offering ways to protect, when needed, the data requested from or sent to the user. In WTLS one finds the same fundamental characteristics observed in all the previous layers in the WAP stack: it is an adaptation of an Internet protocol both to the high latency, narrow bandwidth air interface and to the limited memory and processing power of the WAP device. ...
The following diagram shows how the WAP gateway handles secure sessions. A standard SSL session is opened between the web server and the WAP gateway and a WTLS session is initialized between the gateway and the mobile device. ...
WAP WAP Gateway Web Server
Client
WTLS SSL 3. ...
Today, WAP gateways are available which provide public/private key encryption with a key length up to 1024 bits. ...
The translation between SSL and WTLS takes place in the memory of the WAP gateway. ...
Even though WAP gateways are provided with many features to supply the maximum level of security, there’s still a lot of concern surrounding the WAP security solution. ...
WTLS is an optional layer in the WAP stack. This means that security in WAP is only available on demand and is not a built in feature of the WAP architecture. Hence, the information traveling to and from the WAP gateway is normally not encrypted, unless we use SSL connections to communicate between the origin servers and the gateway.
WIRELESS DATAGRAM PROTOCOL – WDP:
WDP is the bottom layer of the WAP stack and is one of the elements that makes WAP, the extremely portable protocol that it is, operable on extremely different mobile networks.
Approximate Word count = 8849
Approximate Pages = 35.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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