The purpose of this webpage is to inform people about WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and how it is used in mobile technology today.
WAP is an open international standard for appications and has sets of protocols used for wireless communication developed by the WAP Forum. Therefore, WAP is not controlled by any one company. Its main purpose is to enable access to the internet from wirless devices, such as a mobile phone or PDA. This is very much like the internet but with a few more requirements for the given environment, which include optimization for low-bandwidth, low-memory, and low-display. The WAP browser acts like a normal web browser but instead of HTML, it understands WML (Wireless Markup Language). WML is a subset of the web language XML (Extensible Markup Language), which makes learning WML easy and is one of the contrubiting factors to WPAs successs. This browser also has a built in script interpreter for running applications, which uses WMLScript language. Therefore, this browser makes for small file size and accommodates the low memory constraints of handheld devices and low badnwidths of the network.
WAPs central design is based off the OSI model. Here is diagram showing the different layers of the WAP model or sometimes called a stack.
Example WAP network
A user types a URL request, this request is sent to a WAP gateway using the WPA protocol. This WPA gateway, link between the wireless world and the internet, transmits a conventional HTTP request with the specified URL to the web server or WAP server. When the web server recieves the request, it sends a textual form of the requested WML page back to the WAP gateway. If the request is sent to a WAP server, it sends a binary formatted WML page back. Finally, the WAP gateway verifies the textual or binary request. If it is in textual form the WAP gateway compiles the page into the binary WML format just as the WAP server did. This binary transformation is used for greater data compression and is optimized for long latency and low bandwidths. Finally, the WAP gateway sends a WAP response to the users device where the WML page is decompiled and displayed to the user.
Being backed by 75 percent of the companies behind the world's mobile telephone market and the huge development potential of WAP, the future for WAP looks bright (International Engineering Consortium, 2007).