Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)

The explosive growth of the Internet has fuelled the creation of new and exciting information services. Most of the original technology developed for Internet services has been designed for large computers with medium-to-high bit-rate transmission capabilities, large displays, a keyboard and a mouse as input devices. Whereas, mobile devices have small displays and are constrained in terms of CPU processing capacity, available memory, energy consumption, displays size and input methods (i.e., there is not a mouse). An interesting approach for allowing the mobile access to the Internet is provided by Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), a comprehensive and scalable protocol stack designed for use with diverse mobile phones, several network bearers, many mobile network standards and different operating systems. This chapter focuses on WAP key aspects, capabilities and limitations. The whole protocol stack of WAP is introduced and its service architecture is described.