Performance Evaluation on WAP and Internet Protocol over 3G Wireless Networks

Abstract

This research analyses the performance of WAP 1.x in a comparison to the Internet protocol. We implement a WAP client and a WAP gateway based on WAP version 1.1 and assess the response time by comparing to that of HTTP and TCP. We use a W-CDMA simulator to evaluate its performance in high-speed wireless networks such as 2.5G and 3G. The results shows that both protocols have comparable performance (i.e. response time) except when transmitting large content sets (e.g. multimedia data files), in which case the performance of HTTP/TCP is better than that of WAP 1.x. We also evaluate WAP specific functions such as the binary encoding of WAP headers and contents. While binary encoding is effective for small content sets, its effectiveness and performance are questionable for large content sets. Finally, we propose a mobile Internet architecture that is suitable for 2.5G and 3G wireless networks based on the evaluation and our experience with the i-mode service. Our architecture consists of wireless optimized TCP, TLS, HTTP and XHTML.