A proxy architecture to enhance the performance of WAP 2.0 by data compression

This paper presents a novel architecture for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) 2.0 employing a proxy to isolate the wireless domain from the wired domain, and an advanced data compression scheme to significantly reduce the wireless access time (WAT) while overcoming the WAP 1.x end-to-end security problem. The compression scheme combines content compression with robust header compression (ROHC) and minimizes the transmitted air-interface traffic. Performance evaluations show that while WAP 1.x is optimized for narrowband wireless channels, WAP 2.0 utilizing TCP/IP outperforms WAP 1.x in wideband channels even without compression. In IS-95 channels, data compression reduces the WAT of WAP 2.0 by over 70% to give comparable performance to WAP 1.x. In CDMA2000 1XRTT channels, the proposed compression method yields over 46% reduction in WAT over comparable configurations without compression. Most of the improvement comes from compression of reply contents while ROHC gives further enhancements. Request compression is useful for low-bandwidth networks, but gives no benefit in high-speed wireless networks. The proxy optimizes the communication process by eliminating error propagation and reducing the wireless session delay.