WAP: Wireless Application Protocol

1
WAP Wireless Application Protocol

• Matt Thyer
• SAT2600
• Summer 2007

2
Overview

• What is it?
• How does it work?
• Protocol suite
• WAP 2.0
• Failures
• Successes
• Questions

3
What is it?

• WAP is an open international standard for
  applications that uses wireless communication
• Its principal application is to provide access to
  the Internet from a mobile phone or PDA

4
How does it work?

• A WAP browser provides all of the basic features
  of a desktop browser but simplified to operate
  within the restrictions of a mobile browser
• Screen size
• Data rates
• Animation
• Mobile oriented sites are either written in or
  dynamically converted to WML (Wireless Markup
  Language)

5
Protocol Suite

• WAP uses the following protocol suite to emit
  requests to a WAP gateway which coverts into
  plain HTTP
• (WDP) WAP Datagram Protocol is an adaptation
  layer that makes every data network look like UDP
  to the upper layers by providing unreliable
  transport of data with two 16-bit port numbers
  (origin and destination)
• WDP is considered by all the upper layers as one
  protocol
• WTLS provides public-key cryptography-based
  security similar to TLS

6
WAP 2.0

• WAP 2.0 is a redesign of WAP that removes the WAP
  gateway and protocol suite and uses a minimal
  version of XHTML and end-to-end HTTP
• WAP Forum and other groups consolidated into OMA
  (Open Mobile Alliance) which covers everything in
  the future of wireless data services

7
Failures

• WML limited WAP users to only WAP designed sites
• Under-specifications Some phones wouldnt accept
  more that 1kb page sizes other features that
  didnt work properly
• Screen sizes
• Poor authoring tools
• No good profiling tools web servers had a hard
  time determining whether user was on a WAP
  browser or regular desktop browser
• Neglect of content providers Build it and they
  will come

8
Successes

• Japan (i-mode) and Korea
• Picture mail
• JAVA services
• Ringtone service
• Spin-off technologies
• MMS (multimedia messaging service)
• T-Mobile T-Zone
• Korea has proven that WAP on top of the CDMA2000
  network is the state of the art wireless data
  infrastructure

9
Questions?