WAP Protocol Family

The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) consists of a set of protocols that allow the deployment of Internet-like services on a lot of wireless network technologies.

History

The WAP Forum was founded in 1998.

There have been several releases of the standards:

WAP 1.0 (1998) was the first protocol suite, and has never been (fully) implemented in the industry. It however served as a basis for the subsequent releases.
WAP 1.1 (1999) was the first functional and sufficiently industry-mature release of the specifications.
WAP 1.2 (1999) has not been widely adopted, as it was considered by some as an incomplete release.
WAP 1.2.1 (June 2000) could be seen as a bugfix on the WAP 1.2 specifications, however it was a major breakthrough. It is still a successful protocol release.
WAP 2.0 was the last release of WAP specifications released by the WAP Forum, and it implemented the first steps towards convergence between WAP and existing Internet protocols (e.g., HTTP over TCP instead of WSP over UDP or WDP).

The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) was founded in a very short time frame after the release of the WAP 2.0 specification. From that instant on, only bug fixes were added to the WAP 2.0 specification, and a new feature-based technology standardization approach was adopted. This way, the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) now publishes the MMS 1.1 and MMS 1.2 specifications for example, instead of a common OMA 1.1 specification.

Protocols

The WAP transport protocol stack is shown below:

Depending on the protocol stack, 4 different standard WDP (UDP) ports have been defined: 9200, 9201, 9202 and 9203. WSP can run on other ports too.

MMSE: Multimedia_Messaging_Service_Encapsulation: a WAP protocol that implements the 3GPP MMS specification.
WBXML: WAP_Binary_XML: a WAP protocol that allows compact representation of XML content such as WML.
WSP: Wireless_Session_Protocol: a WAP protocol that implements a pull and push HTTP-like protocol.
WDP: Wireless_Datagram_Protocol: a WAP protocol that provides UDP-like functionality over non-IP bearers.
WTLS: Wireless_Transport_Layer_Security: a WAP protocol that implements over-the-air encryption.
WTP: Wireless_Transaction_Protocol: a WAP protocol that implements transactions over UDP-like transport.

Wireshark

The WAP protocols in Wireshark are mature.

Example capture file

Example capture files for WAP protocols can be found at the SampleCaptures page.

Display Filter

See the individual WAP protocols.

Capture Filter

You cannot directly filter WAP protocols while capturing.

External links

Discussion

Imported from https://wiki.wireshark.org/WapProtocolFamily on 2020-08-11 23:27:19 UTC