Wireless Application Protocol

WIRELESS APPLICATION PROTOCOL

The growth of the internet, internet applications, and mobile communications led to many early proprietary solutions providing internet services for mobile, wireless devices. Some of the problems these partial solutions face were discussed in section 10.2 because the World Wide Web is the most important and fastest growing internet application. To avoid many islands of incompatible solutions, e.g. special solutions for GSM, IS-136, or certain manufacturers, the wireless application protocol forum (WAP Forum) was founded in June 1997 by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Unwired Planet.

The basic objectives of the WAP Forum and now of the OMA are to bring diverse internet content (e.g., web pages, push services) and other data services (e.g., stock quotes) to digital cellular phones and other wireless, mobile terminals (e.g., PDAs, laptops). Moreover, a protocol suite should enable global wireless communication across different wireless network technologies, e.g., GSM, CDPD, UMTS etc. The forum is embracing and extending existing standards and technologies of the internet wherever possible and is creating a framework for the development of contents and applications that scale across a very wide range of wireless bearer networks and wireless device types.

Interoperable, i.e., allowing terminals  and software from different vendors to   communicate with networks from different providers;  

Scaleale, i.e., protocols and services should scale with customer needs and number of customers;  

Efficient, i.e., provision of QoS suited to the characteristics of the wireless and mobile networks;