Wireless Access Protocol

A standard for providing cellphones, pagers and other handhelds with secure access to e-mail and text-based Web pages. Introduced in 1997 by Phone.com, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia, WAP provides an environment for wireless applications that includes a wireless version of TCP/IP and a framework for telephony integration such as call control and phone book access. Supporting keypad and voice recognition, WAP is independent of the air interface and runs over all major wireless networks. It is also device independent and can be used in any mobile device.

A carrier-independent, device-independent, transaction-oriented protocol employed in Web-enabled cellular networks in support of text, graphics, and audio.The best performance is achieved when accessing Web sites written in WML (Wireless Markup Language), which is similar to HTML. The alternative is transcoding from HTML to WML, which is accomplished through gateways.A much simpler, but much less attractive technique is Web clipping, which strips the graphic content out of Web pages. Security over the wireless link is provided through Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS).WAP is employed outside of Japan, where the i-Mode microbrowser technology is employed.