The new Internet reality is that of wireless networks, providing service to legions of miniaturized, hand-held mobile devices. This places an entirely new set of requirements on the underlying communications protocols - they must provide the power efficiency demanded by hand-held wireless devices, together with the bandwidth efficiency demanded by wide area wireless networks.
At some point, the wireless data communications industry must agree on a common set of standard protocols that satisfies these requirements. Unfortunately, the road to an industry standard is a rocky one. The wireless industry is populated by a number of disparate constituencies and self-interests. Among these constituencies are the technical community, with its fundamental mandate to create sound engineering solutions, and the business community, ultimately driven by the pursuit of profit and marketplace advantage. The differing agendas of these constituencies frequently bring them into conflict.
In this confusing environment it can be very difficult to distinguish between developments that are genuine, enabling technologies, and those that are ill-conceived wild-goose chases.
Into this chaotic arena comes WAP. On April 30 1998, a group of business interests published a set of specifications referred to as the Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP. WAP is a specification for wireless data communications using hand-held devices such as mobile phones and palmtop computers. Use of the WAP specification allows mobile devices to communicate with the Internet or an intranet, providing the users of these devices with mobile data communications capabilities such as web-browsing and e-mail.
The WAP specification was developed by the WAP Forum, an industry association of wireless device manufacturers, service providers, and software companies. The WAP Forum was founded in June 1997 by three mobile phone manufacturers (Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia), together with the US software company Phone.com (formerly Unwired Planet). The WAP specification is largely the product of these four founding companies. Further information about the WAP Forum can be found at its website at http://www.wapforum.org/.
The Wireless Applications Protocol purports to be just what the doctor ordered: a set of standards that will unify the wireless data applications industry. WAP presents itself as an open, license-free standard for wireless Internet access. It claims to be a well-designed engineering construction, allowing free interoperability among wireless industry vendors. It claims to be an enabling technology that will catalyze the development of the wireless industry, to the ultimate benefit of the industry and the consumer.
As we will argue in this article, however, WAP satisfies none of these claims.
Industry standards do not usually come about as the result of an orderly design process. Especially in the early stages of industry development, protocols and standards arise organically, and without the benefit of hindsight. Because of this, early protocols are frequently very much less than ideal. As Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems, puts it,
"Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks."
Though his phrasing leaves much to be desired, his point is beyond debate: the most appalling solution is better than no solution at all.
However, history has shown that successful protocols tend have certain characteristics in common. By a "successful" protocol, we mean one which becomes accepted as an industry standard in the face of competing protocols, endures as an standard in the long term, and serves to promote the growth of the industry.
The key characteristics of a successful protocol are:
Not all successful protocols have all these attributes. Nevertheless, as the history of protocol development demonstrates, the more a protocol conforms to these attributes, the more likely it is to become an enduring industry standard. An analysis of several successful and failed protocols, supporting this conclusion, is provided in The LEAP Manifesto [13].
WAP claims to have all four of the above attributes. In fact, it has none of them. WAP has claimed center stage not because it fulfills the needs of the industry, but because thus far, no viable alternative has been presented.
In this article we will show that WAP is entirely unfit for the purpose being claimed for it. We will show that it is handicapped as a result of the processes the WAP Forum has used to develop it, and that it includes numerous serious technical design errors. Our conclusion will be that the WAP specification is essentially a marketing construct, rather than an engineering one. It is designed to provide short-term financial benefit to a minority of the WAP Forum members, rather than providing long-term benefit to the industry at large and the consumer.
We will then enumerate and analyze the steps that can be taken to prevent the harm of WAP. One of the most crucial steps will be to identify alternatives to WAP, and eventually adopt one of these in place of WAP.
Finally, we will propose one alternative to WAP, namely LEAP, the Lightweight and Efficient Application Protocol. We provide a brief description of LEAP, and provide references to where further information on LEAP can be found.
This article is one of a series of articles we have written that analyze the current status of the wireless data communications industry, criticize WAP, and present our view of what is truly needed to promote the growth of the industry. Other articles in this series are:
This document is available in several alternative formats at the Free
Protocols Foundation website
(http://www.FreeProtocols.org/wapTrap):
We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following persons in the preparation and review of this document: Andrew Hammoude, Richard Stallman, Bill Frezza and Rob Mechaley.
The authors of this article were also the initial developers of LEAP, and therefore have a vested interest in the success of LEAP over WAP.
However, we are also active participants in the Free Protocols Foundation (FPF), under whose auspices this article is being written. As participants in the FPF, we are fully committed to its patent-free principles; principles which WAP violates completely. The mission of the Free Protocols Foundation is to provide support for patent-free protocols. Part of this mission is to provide support for patent-free alternatives to patented protocols such as WAP. It is in the spirit of this mission that this article is being written.
The purpose of this article is not to promote LEAP or any other particular alternative to WAP. The purpose of this article is to expose the harm of WAP and describe the steps that can be taken to prevent it. Any other viable alternatives to WAP that are brought to our attention, and that conform to the principles of the Free Protocols Foundation, will be promptly referenced at the FPF website, and included in subsequent versions of this article.
The most recent version of this article, describing all known alternatives to WAP, will be maintained on the FPF website at http://www.FreeProtocols.org.