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The Internet is Mobile............
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According to industry analysts, the number of Internet users would exceed the 350 million mark by the turn of the millennium. These users access the Internet primarily through wireline channels from PCs. Estimates indicate that the number of mobile phone users using voice service is over 300 million subscribers. Mobile phone users and industry alike feel the need for enhanced data services like web browsing and e-mail offered by Internet to the wireline user community. In 1997, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Unwired Planet (now Phone.com) founded the WAP Forum to design a common wireless protocol specification for offering advanced data services. The key goal of WAP Forum was to create an open protocol specification for bringing the Internet content to wireless phones and terminals. Today, a large number of wireless device manufacturers and mobile network operators are using the WAP specifications to enhance their product lines and services. The network operators are effectively using WAP to increase their revenues and customer base, at the same time offering a significant value addition to their subscribers. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open license-free specification defined by an industry group called WAP Forum (http://www.wapforum.org). WAP Forum has members representing different sections of wireless and Internet industry like handset vendors, network operators, infrastructure providers, software developers, Internet content developers and service providers. Article further discusses features, Architecture, Wireless Datagram Protocol (WDP), Wireless Transaction Layer Security (WTLS), Market Potential of the WAP.

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Multisite Methodology for CRM Projects

Table of Content

Wipro Technologies, Global R&D Solutions.........................................................01 Executive Sumary.............................................................................................01 Introduction.........................................................................................................01 Motivation..........................................................................................................02 Features.............................................................................................................02 Architecure........................................................................................................03 Market Potenial.................................................................................................07 Wipros WAP Solutions.......................................................................................07 Conclusions........................................................................................................09 About Wipro.......................................................................................................10 Wipro Enterprise WAP Gateway .......................................................................10 Wipro Embedded WAP Client Solution ..............................................................10

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Wipro Technologies, Global R&D Solutions

Wipro Technologies, Global R&D Solutions is an associate member of WAP Forum. We offer latest WAP based reliable solutions that include Wipro enterprise WAP gateway, Wipro embedded WAP client, WAP application development and deployment services.

Executive Summary
According to industry analysts, the number of Internet users would exceed the 350 million mark by the turn of the millennium. The user profile ranges from large corporations to home users, with typical usage varying from managing geographically distributed business units to electronic entertainment. These users access the Internet primarily through wireline channels from PCs. Estimates indicate that the number of mobile phone users using voice service is over 300 million. Recently, mobile network operators have started offering basic data services such as SMS and fax to their subscribers. Mobile phone users and industry alike feel the need for enhanced data services like web browsing and e-mail offered by Internet to the wireline user community. Though efforts have already been made to offer such services, the number of non-PC non-wired users is almost negligible due to lack of standard access technologies and interoperable devices. In 1997, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Unwired Planet (now Phone.com) founded the AP Forum to design a common wireless protocol specification for offering advanced data services. The key goal of WAP Forum was to create an open protocol specification for bringing the Internet content to wireless phones and terminals. WAP Forum membership is open to all companies offering products and services in any segment of wireless industry value chain. Using WAP Forums open specifications, companies can develop products that are interoperable without compromising on the uniqueness of their products and services. Today, a large number of wireless device manufacturers and mobile network operators are using the WAP specifications to enhance their product lines and services. The network operators are effectively using WAP to increase their revenues and customer base, at the same time offering a significant value addition to their subscribers.

Introduction
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open license-free specification defined by an industry group called WAP Forum (http://www.wapforum.org). WAP Forum has members representing different sections of wireless and Internet industry like handset vendors, network operators, infrastructure providers, software developers, Internet content developers and service providers. The WAP specification is a result of WAP Forums effort to develop a global wireless internet standard which brings information and advanced services available on the Internet to mass market, hand-held wireless

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devices such as digital cellular phones, PDAs, pagers, two-way radios and other wireless terminals. The specification enables development of applications that can offer services like e-mail, web browsing, on-line shopping, on-line banking, on-line ticketing, stock quotes, etc., to an end user on his or her mobile phone.

Motivation
During the last couple of years, the Internet has grown at a tremendous pace and has proved to be an easy and efficient way for delivering services to millions of wireline users. Parallely, wireless voice communication has grown at an equally rapid pace and gained wide acceptance. However, both these technologies have certain shortcomings: The Internet requires a wireline connectivity for accessing the services, posing a problem to those users who spend substantial amount of their time on the move. Todays wireless network infrastructure does not have the flexibility required for rapid deployment of wireless data services like telephony services. The Internet and wireless industries realised that Wireless Internet can be a single solution that can effectively address the shortcomings of both these technologies. Wireless Internet not only enables accessing the services offered by Internet from mobile phones thereby overcoming the constraint imposed by the Internet, but also allows the network operators to host wireless data services on Internet platform. Early efforts at unifying the Internet and wireless technologies to launch wireless services were not very successful. Such attempts were made by independent wireless data carriers using proprietary technologies that were bound to fail due to a fragmented market and low economies of scale. The WAP Forum was founded by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Unwired Planet (now Phone.com) to develop standards to make universal wireless Internet access a reality. The WAP specification was developed by WAP Forum to adapt the Internet technology to address issues specific to wireless environment. The inherent constraints of wireless network technology like limited bandwidth, high latency, unpredictable availability and less reliable connection stability are adequately addressed by the WAP specification. The WAP specification also deals with issues related to wireless devices like limited computational capability, small memory size, limited battery power, limited input mode and small display size.

Features
WAP can be loosely described as a set of protocols derived from existing Internet standards and wireless network standards developed by some of the leading companies in wireless business. Following are some of the key features of WAP:

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1. Interoperability: WAP is an open license-free standard, which ensures that WAPcompliant devices are interoperable. 2. Scalability: WAP applications scale across a variety of wireless transport options like GSM SMS, GSM USSD, IP, CDMA, etc., and also across a wide range of wireless terminals from hand sets to powerful PDAs. 3. Extensibility: WAP has been designed as a future-proof technology. It is extensible over time to new networks and transports thereby protecting the mobile network operators investment in wireless data.

4. Flexibility: WAP is a flexible solution that caters to the requirements of various types of applications by providing service options like connection mode and connection-less services, with or without end-to-end security. 5. Reusability: WAP specification extends and adapts existing Internet standards such as HTTP, IP, Proxy technology, SSL, TLS, XML, HTML,etc., to wireless environment instead of defining a new set of standards, facilitating utilisation of existing Internet infrastructure as is. This approach benefits the content developer community by allowing familiar programming models, proven architectures and everaging existing tools like authoring and publishing applications.

Architecture
The layered architecture model of WAP stack is illustrated in Figure 1. The WAP stack consists of four protocols - WSP, WTP, WTLS and WDP along with an application environment framework (WAE). A prominent feature of the WAP stack is that an application or service can directly access any of the four underlying layers through a set of well-defined interfaces based on the needs of the application as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: WAP Architecture

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The WAP stack can be configured in four different ways to provide four different types of services. Following are the four types of services offered by WAP: 1. Connectionless service: The WAP protocol stack used for this service consists of only WSP layer operating directly over WDP layer. 2. Connectionless service with security: This configuration is similar to connectionless service but provides security by having WTLS layer between WSP and WDP layers. 3. Connection oriented service: The configuration of protocol stack used for this service consists of WSP, WTP and WDP layers with ordering of the layers same as that shown in Figure 1. WTP and WDP layers together provide a connection oriented transport service in this configuration. 4. Connection oriented service with security: This configuration consists of all the layers of WAP stack as shown in Figure 1. WAP protocols have been designed to operate transparently over data capable wireless networks supporting different data transport mechanisms (bearers) which include packet data networks, short message services and circuit-switched data networks. Some of the bearers which are currently supported by WAP are GSM SMS, GSM USSD, CSD, IPv4, IPv6 and CDMA. The following paragraphs describe different protocol layers and application environment of WAP in detail.

Wireless Datagram Protocol (WDP)

WDP provides the higher layers of the stack with a onsistent interface to underlying bearer. WDP operates transparently over one of the available bearer services thereby making the upper layers of the WAP stack independent of the bearer. Since the services offered by underlying bearers vary widely, WDP contains adaptation layers to map WDP functions to services offered by different bearers. The functionality of WDP when operating on IP bearer is exactly same as the Internet standard User Datagram Protocol (UDP). WDP provides a connection-less, unreliable datagram service. WDP supports simultaneous communication instances from a higher layer over a single underlying bearer service. WDP uses port numbers to address higher layer entities as in transport layer of the Internet protocol stack. WDP can be extended to support optional error reporting mechanism by adding Wireless Control Message Protocol (WCMP) functionality, which is similar to Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).

Wireless Transaction Layer Security (WTLS)

WTLS operates over WDP and provides the upper layers with a secure transport service interface, which preserves the transport service interface of WDP. WTLS provides end-to-end security features, which include:

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Confidentiality using data encryption algorithms Data integrity using Message Authentication Codes Non-repudiation and strong authentication using digital certificates In addition to connection security, WTLS also offers on-the-fly payload compression service. WTLS is a derivative of the Internet standard TLS (RFC 2246) protocol with optimizations required to operate effectively on a datagram service running on a low-bandwidth network.

Wireless Transaction Layer (WTP)

WTP layer provides a lightweight transaction service, i.e., a request/response service, which can operate efficiently over a secure, or insecure datagram service. It provides three classes of service, namely, unreliable push service reliable push service reliable transaction service The features of WTP are selective retransmissions, duplicate removal, segmentation/reassembly, port number addressing, user-to-user reliability (through user-to-user acknowledgements) in addition to protocol acknowledgements, asynchronous transactions, optional out-of-band information, delayed acknowledgements and message concatenation to improve over-the-air efficiency. WTP is message oriented protocol, which makes it suitable for interactive browsing applications.

Wireless Session Protocol (WSP)

WSP layer provides mechanisms and semantics based on the Internet standard, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1) along with additional functionalities such as: protocol feature negotiation (capability negotiation) compact encoding of data session suspend/resume long lived session states asynchronous requests common facility for confirmed and non-confirmed data push Other than these additional features added to address issues in a low-bandwidth net Wipro Technologies Page : 05 of 10

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WSP is a binary version of HTTP/1.1.

Wireless Application Environment (WAE)

WAE provides a network neutral and device independent application environment framework, which enables a wide range of applications (user-agents) to be used on wireless terminals. WAE is consistent with the Internet/WWW programming model including authoring and publishing methods. WAE allows the MMI to be controlled by the vendor of the handset. WAE is designed to leverage on standard Web Servers (origin servers) to host content and services. The content is addressed using the Internet standard URLs and URIs. Following are the various components of WAE:

Wireless Markup Language (WML) WMLScript WAP Content Types Wireless Telephony Application (WTA) environment

WML is a tag based markup language, which is derived from XML and is similar to the Internet standard HTML. WML addresses the constraints such as small displays, limited user-input capability, narrow-band network connections, limited processing power and limited memory resources in a wireless device. The key features of WML are navigation support, hyperlinks, soft-button support, screen management (displaying formatted text, images) and user data input (text, selection lists). WMLScript is a lightweight procedural scripting language. It is an extended subset of JavaScript TM scripting language. It enhances the presentation facilities offered by WML and supports advanced dynamic UI behavior by adding intelligence on the client side. WAP defines several content formats based on standard WWW content formats that facilitate interoperable data exchange. All WAP content is specified in one of the defined content formats. As in WWW content formats, a header containing content type field allows the micro-browser to process the content based on its type. The two most important formats defined by WAP are encoded WML and WMLScript formats. WAP defines binary encoding formats for WML and MLScript to make transmission of these content types more efficient as well as to minimise the processing effort needed on the client. Additionally standard WWW content formats for images, calendar data formats (vCalendar 1.0), electronic business cards (vCard 2.1) are also supported. WTA provides extensions for telephony services like call and feature control mechanisms, voice mail, messaging, phone-book management, etc., to make them accessible to WAP content developers. WTA framework also allows real-time processing of events important to the end-user while browsing. WTA provides a library of telephony-related functions called Wireless Telephony Application Interface (WTAI) that can be invoked from WML/WMLScript. WTAI can be used to

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perform functions like call-management, call set-up, answering an incoming call, etc. WAE typically consists of two user-agents: a micro-browser and a telephony application. A micro-browser is similar to a web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer with additional optimizations required to run on a consumer handset. A micro-browser interprets WML/WMLScript content types. A telephony application is used for providing telephony services offered by WTA to end-user. WWW content (e.g., HTML), a filter is used to translate the WWW content to WAP content.

A WAP network need not have all the elements shown in Figure 2. An origin server itself may support both WAP proxy and filtering functionality, in whichcase, a wireless device can directly contact the origin server. This type of configuration can be used to facilitate end-to-end security solutions, better access control or guarantee of responsiveness.

Market Potential
As WAP aims at bridging two of the most successful technologies of the communication revolution - Internet and Wireless, the success of WAP is assured. Market studies show that the share of global wireless communication revenues - as a percentage of the total telecommunication revenues - is consistently on the rise (from a mere 5% in 1992 to around 20% in 2000). With telecommunication industry revenues touching the US $1000 billion mark and growing at a rate of 7%, the industry is all set to reach the US $1.5 trillion size by 2004. Close to a quarter of these revenues would be from the wireless domain - where WAP enabled product vendors, service providers and network operators would meet the advanced data needs of over 500 million subscribers.

Wipros WAP Solutions

Wipro Technologies, Global R&D Solutions offers following WAP solutions: 1. Enterprise WAP Gateway 2. Embedded WAP Client Solution 3. WAP Service/Application Development Wipro is an associate member of WAP Forum and is committed to upgrading its products to newer versions of WAP specifications as and when they are released by the WAP Forum. The WAP solutions offered by Wipro are described below in detail.

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Wipro Enterprise WAP Gateway

Wipro Enterprise WAP Gateway is a high performance, scalable solution suitable for deployment in a corporate intranet environment. It can be used as a platform for hosting corporate wide applications including, but not limited to, enterprise messaging, appointment, calendar, contacts list, corporate database, intranet portals, etc. Following are the main features of Wipro Enterprise WAP Gateway: Scalable, high performance architecture Works on ubiquitous UDP/IP network Optional customised security module (WTLS) WAP Proxy support for accessing other intranet servers Open API similar to BSD Sockets to facilitate easy migration of existing applications and development of new applications Interoperable with any WAP compliant mobile terminal Seamless integration with existing enterprise web servers Web based tool for configuration and remote administration Wipro Enterprise WAP Gateway is currently available on Linux and Solaris platforms. Microsoft Windows NT port will be available soon.

Wipro Embedded WAP Client Solution

Wipro is developing a highly optimized, portable and customisable WAP client solution for wireless information terminals running embedded operating systems like PalmOS, VxWorks, Windows CE, etc. The Wipro WAP client solution consists of client-side WAP stack and a microbrowser. The client-side WAP stack currently supports IP bearer and it can be customised to run on a wide gamut of wireless mobile devices supporting different bearer network technologies. Also, the flexible architecture of Wipro client-side WAP stack allows the stack to be customised and tuned for optimum performance and memory footprint on a variety of wireless terminals. The microbrowser is based on highly modular design and can be customized to work on a wide range of devices from mobile phones to PDAs with different display and input capabilities. Wipro has vast experience and expertise in developing microbrowsers for its customers and can offer a high performance, optimised, cost-effective microbrowser solution in a short period of time.

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WAP Service/Application Development

Wipro can undertake development and deployment of WAP based services and applications based on customer needs. Wipro has already developed WAP based services for its customers and has in-depth know-how in this domain. Wipro has developed WAP application suites that include stock updates, calendar, chat/ message boards, news, messaging applications and secure personalized services, for its customers.

Conclusions
The primary focus of WAP technology is to create a global wireless internet by bringing services offered by internet to mobile phone users. Industry leaders in handset manufacturing representing over 90% of the world market and mobile network operators representing about 300 million subscribers are adopting this technology. WAP has been designed to benefit wireless subscribers, handset vendors, network operators and service providers. Subscribers get access to a wide range of services available on Internet from their mobile phones and other wireless interoperable open standard, which is handset vendor independent.

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About Wipro
Wipro Technologies is a part of Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT), and is a leading global provider of high end IT solutions. The IT solutions provided include application development services to corporate enterprises and hardware and software design services to technology companies. The companys top clients include Lucent, Canon, Epson, Hitachi, Sony, Toshiba, Cisco, IBM and ARM.

Wipro Enterprise WAP Gateway

Wipro Enterprise WAP Gateway is a high performance, scalable solution suitable for deployment in a corporate intranet environment. It can be used as a platform for hosting corporate wide applications including, but not limited to, enterprise messaging, appointment, calendar, contacts list, corporate database, intranet portals, etc. Wipro Enterprise WAP Gateway is currently available on Linux and Solaris platforms. Microsoft Windows NT port will be available soon.

Wipro Embedded WAP Client Solution

Wipro is developing a highly optimized, portable and customizable WAP client solution for wireless information terminals running embedded operating systems like PalmOS, VxWorks, Windows CE, etc. The Wipro WAP client solution consists of client-side WAP stack and a micro browser.
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