Chapter Thirteen. Wireless Application Protocol and I-Mode

The primary objective of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is to bring Internet content and Web services to mobile devices and cellular phones. WAP is an open , global specification to enable communications between mobile wireless users to access and interact with Web information and services. One of the fundamental aspects of WAP is the customization of Web content for data transfer over the wireless medium.

The success and ubiquity of the World Wide Web (WWW) and mobile phone technologies have created a great demand for convergence and data transfer across domains. A wide variety of Web applications and services that are suited for wired networks could not readily work over wireless links and on resource-constrained mobile phones. The limitations of wireless networks have been discussed in Chapter 7. Hence, customization of Web data over wireless links was necessary. Initial proposals for WAP came from Ericsson, Nokia, and Phone.com. With increased interest from other companies, a WAP forum was created to handle the task of designing and developing an open wireless communications protocol that can work over several wireless technologies (e.g., CDPD, CDMA, GPRS, iDEN, TDMA, PHS, FLEX, TETRA, DECT). The WAP Forum is open to all, and several network operators and manufacturers have joined hands to develop WAP specifications. The WAP stack can operate on a wide variety of mobile devices supporting various operating systems like PalmOS, EPOC, Windows CE, and JAVA OS. The first draft of WAP architecture was published September 1997, and a complete WAP 1.0 specification was ready by April 1998 for product development.

There are about 50 million WAP mobile phones in circulation worldwide. There are several million pages of WAP content and about 10,000 sites that support WAP users. WAP- related content and services are increasing on a daily basis as the demand is increasing. Currently, commerce, finance, entertainment, and messaging applications are the most widely used services within WAP.

The rest of the chapter provides WAP architecture details and discusses its role in providing wireless IP services. The second part of the chapter includes a discussion of I-mode and how it is related to WAP. The WAP technology presentation is not specifically related to a specification release, but the latest specification has been used to provide up-to-date information. At the end of this chapter, the most recent changes are noted in the discussion of WAP 2.0.