Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open standard first developed in 1997 for mobile applications in a wireless communications environment.
The goal was to develop a technology that would operate over any kind of mobile wireless network, including GSM, CDMA and TDMA based networks, and 3G technologies such as UMTS.
WAP technology is primarily designed to enable mobile devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) to access the world wide web and other internet services such as emails, information services and media content.
Architecture of a WAP Gateway
- WDP (wireless datagram protocol) - a transport layer datagram service like UDP that sends and receives messages via any available bearer network, providing unreliable transport of data.
- WTLS (wireless transport layer security) - An optional security layer, has encryption facilities that provide the secure transport service required by many application such as e-commerce
- WTP (wireless transaction protocol) - provides transaction support, adding reliability tot he data gram service provided by WDP
- WDP (wireless session protocol) - with WTP, a complete replacement for HTTP, allowing the efficient exchange of data between mobile web applications
- HTTP Interface - the HTTP interface serves to retrieve WAP content from the internet requested by the mobile devices.