An informative article at SunWorld discusses a new protocol family for mobile devices, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), which has proposed as a standard for smart cell phones, pagers, wireless personal digital assistants. Rawn Shah writes, at SunWorld.com, . . .

“Unlike most computers, which use protocols such as HTTP over TCP over IP to access the Web, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) has its own protocols that operate in a format more natural for wireless delivery. All WAP Internet connections still have to go through a gateway that connects the two protocols, but the gateway itself can add other services that optimize communications.”

WAP is designed to handle higher latencies, unpredictable service availability, unpredictable connection stability, and lower bandwidth, all of which present problems for wireless communication. In particular, instability, service availability, and latency problems make it hard to maintain connection-oriented services like TCP, which means most Internet applications that use TCP as their delivery mechanism won't work reliably on a wireless network. Thus the need for WAP.”

” . . . WAP devices are now available from Nokia and Ericsson and will soon be available from Motorola. Nokia has also released a WAP server for backend services; IBM will add middleware and resell the package in its Netfinity PC servers . . .”

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