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Thursday, January 10, 2008

PROTOCOL DESIGN LESSON FROM WAP

            There has been considerable discussion about whether the WAP protocol design was appropriate. Some have suggested that the bandwidth-sparing simple interface of Gopher would be a better match for mobile phones and Personal digital assistants (PDAs).

The initial design of WAP was specifically aimed at protocol independence across a range of different protocols (SMS, IP over PPP over a circuit switched bearer, IP over GPRS, etc). This has led to a protocol considerably more complex than an approach directly over IP might have caused.

Most controversial, especially for many from the IP side, was the design of WAP over IP. WAP's transmission layer protocol, WTP, uses its own retransmission mechanisms over UDP to attempt to solve the problem of inadequacy using TCP over high packet loss networks.


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