Build a WAP Gateway On Linux

By Manas Ranjan Behera
2005-05-27


Basic steps for setting up a WAP gateway

The hottest technology for implementing mobile services is the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). This article discusses the advantages of working with the open source gateway for WAP, which performs the protocol conversion between a Web server and a mobile phone.

The WAP gateway works by letting a telephone act as a simple Web browser with optimized markup language, scripting language, and the transmission protocols for wireless-over-the-air use. It talks to the phone using the WAP protocol stack and translates the requests it receives to normal HTTP. Therefore, content providers can use any HTTP server and utilize existing know-how about HTTP service implementation and administration.

In addition to protocol translations, the gateway also compresses the WML (Wireless Markup Language) pages into a more compact form, which saves bandwidth on the air and further reduces the phone's processing requirements. It also compiles WMLScript programs into a bytecode format.

There are various commercial WAP gateways available on the market that are quite expensive. Kannel, on the other hand, is an open source gateway; you don't need to pay for it, you can edit the source code yourself, and you can construct your own customized gateway. Because Kannel is being developed on Linux systems (RedHat and Debian), it can be smoothly ported to other UNIX-like operating systems. However, in this article, I illustrate building the gateway for these two Linux systems only.

Tutorial Pages:
» Basic steps for setting up a WAP gateway
» Kannel gateway architecture
» Basic software and hardware requirements
» Setting up the gateway
» Working with the gateway
» Starting the gateway
» Administering the gateway through an HTTP interface
» Testing with a WAP-enabled mobile phone simulator
» In conclusion
» Resources


First published by IBM DeveloperWorks

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