Introduction to WAP

WAP is published by the WAP Forum. This Forum was founded in 1997 by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Unwired Planet.

These companies organized an industry group called the (Wireless Application Protocol) WAP Forum. This group produces the WAP specification, a (long and detailed) series of technical documents that define standards for implementing wireless network applications. Hundreds of industry firms have given strong backing to the WAP Forum, so the technology should become widely adopted, and it is already well-hyped.

WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol.

It is a application communication protocol which is used to access services and information from handheld devices such as mobile phones.

WAP protocol is designed for Micro Browsers (Similar to HTTP for Web Browsers). Similar to HTML used by HTTP protocol, WAP protocol uses WML (Web Markup Language).

The syntax for WML follows the XML 1.0 rules.

WAP is for handheld devices such as mobile phones.

Each and Every mobile devices which supports WAP have a small browser called Micro Browser.Micro Browser is a small software module or a software programe which requires minimum hardware,less memory consuption and CPU power.This is interprate with Web Markup Language WML syntax.

This Web Markup Language is equivelent to the JavaScript for Web Browsers.This Micro Browser supports a reduced version of the JavaScript called WMLScript. Also for showing images on the mobile devices, Micro Browser supports WBMP (Wireless Bitmap) image files.

WAP Protocol is layered in a way similar to OSI model protocol, in which each of the layers is accessible by the layers above, as well as other services and applications. There are four major layers in the WAP protocol:

2. Session layer (WSP)

3. Transaction layer (WTP)

4. Security Layer (WTLS)

5. Transport layer or datagram layer (WDP)

WAP's application layer is the Wireless Application Environment (WAE). WAE directly supports WAP application development with Wireless Markup Language (WML) in place of HTML and WMLScript instead of JavaScript.WAE is to provide the operators and service providers an interoperable environment on which they can build applications and services which, in turn, can be used in a wide variety of hand-held client terminals such as Mobile phone.

WAP's session layer is the Wireless Session Protocol (WSP). WSP is the equivalent to HTTP for WAP browsers but it is not similar to HTTP. WAP involves browsers and servers just like the internet technology, but HTTP was not a practical choice for WAP because of its relative inefficiency on the wire. WSP conserves precious bandwidth on wireless links; in particular, WSP works with relatively compact binary data where HTTP works mainly with text data.

These three protocols uses in WAP:

Wireless Transaction Protocol (WTP)

Wireless Transaction Layer Security (WTLS)

Wireless Datagram Protocol (WDP)

The Wireless Transaction Protocol(WTP) operates efficiently over either secure or non-secure wireless datagram networks. It provides three different kinds of wireless transaction services, these are:

Unreliable one-way,

Reliable one-way and

Reliable two-way transactions.

This layer also includes optional user-to-user reliability by triggering the confirmation of each received message or information. To reduce the number of messages which was sent, the feature of delaying acknowledgements can be used.

Security protocol is based on Transport Layer Security (TLS) or formely known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). It is designed to be used with other WAP protocols and to support narrow-band networks. It uses data encryption with a method that is negotiated at the start of the session to provide privacy,protection,and data integrity, authentication and denial-of-service protection.

Wireless Datagram Protocol (WDP) in WAP architecture covers the Transmission Layer Protocols (TLP) in an Internet model. As a general transport services, WDP offers to the upper layers an invisible interface independent of the underlying network technology used. In consequence of the interface common to transport protocols, the upper layer protocols of the WAP architecture can operate independent of the underlying wireless network.

WAP uses a Micro Browser for small wireless terminal.

A Micro Browser is a small piece of software program that makes minimal demands on hardware, memory and CPU. It can display information written in a restricted mark-up language called WML.

The Micro Browser can also interpret a reduced version of JavaScript called WMLScript.