Introduction to Mobile Internet

Strathmore Mobile Boot Camp
November 2010
Mobile Website Development
Introduction to Mobile Internet

Facilitated by:
Michael Wakahe
Shujaa Solutions Ltd

Table of Contents

 The Need for Mobile Web

 Mobile Web History

Copyright © Shujaa Solutions Ltd. 2010. All
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The Need for Mobile Web

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 Limitations of mobile phones
 Limited Processor Power and Memory

 Limited Battery Life

 Limited Input and Output Facilities

 Low Bandwidth

 Unpredictable Availability and Stability
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 TCP/IP protocol suite was not designed for a
wireless environment

 Bandwidth resource is expensive

 HTML pages are not suitable for use in mobile
devices with limited processor power and
screen.
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 Users consume mobile services differently.

 They buy and pay for their mobiles and mobile
software differently.

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Mobile devices available today can be
broken down in to a few broad classes:
1. Feature Phones
2. Smart Phones
3. PDAs
4. Voice-Only Phones

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 Feature Phones are the most common device
type.

 They usually come in candy bar, clamshell or
slider form.

 They have a 12-key layout and typically come
with voice, messaging and data capabilities.

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Figures: Feature
Phones

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 Smart phones share the same features as a

feature phone with two primary differences:

 its ability to run additional third-party applications

 a slightly larger screen.

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 Smart phones typically use a more full
featured operating system

 Companies market them as them as advanced
multimedia devices to consumers or as
productivity devices to the business sector.

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Figure: Smartphone
- iPhone

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 PDAs evolved from the PDAs of the ‘90s
 Now often include voice, messaging, and data
capabilities.
 PDAs have much in common with smart
phone
 But differ in that much of their functionality is
oriented towards organizational tasks rather
then voice communications.
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Figure: Personal
Digital Assistants

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 Voice-Only Phones are typically extremely
low-cost phones aimed at developing
markets

 Are not relevant in the context of the Mobile
Web.

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 Feature Phones lead the market by a large margin

 However the borderline between the Feature Phones
and Smart Phones is constantly shifting towards the
Smart Phone category

 The newest Feature Phones are often equal in
functionality to yesterday’s Smart Phones.

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Figure: Distribution
of Mobile Handsets

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 The Web is a vast collection of servers linked by
TCP/IP computer networks.
 These web servers, implement the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to share documents and
files.
 Web servers provide access by Uniform Resource
Identifiers (URIs) to text files, markup documents,
and binary resources.

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 In an HTTP request, the client sends a web
server the URI of the desired resource and a
collection of request headers

 One of the request headers contains a list of
MIME types that advertise the content types
supported on the client.

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 In an HTTP response, the web server sends
the client the document itself (markup, text,
or binary) and another set of headers

 One of the response headers contains the
MIME type describing the file type of the
document transmitted to the client.

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Mobile Web History

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Mobile Web History

 Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum was

founded in 1997 by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and

Phone.com.

 WAP 1.1 was published in 1999

 WAP 2.0 was published in 2001
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Mobile Web History

 In 2002, the WAP Forum consolidated into the Open

Mobile Alliance (OMA) and the specification work

from WAP continues within OMA

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Mobile Web History

 WAP is designed with two main goals

 to minimize bandwidth requirement

 to maximize the number of supported network

types (e.g., 9.6 Kbps in GSM).
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Mobile Web History
Figure: The WAP
protocol stack

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Mobile Web History
 WAP protocol stack is a lightweight protocol stack
that is designed to address the limitations of wireless
devices and the wireless network.

 To access ordinary web servers, WAP-enabled mobile
devices can rely on a WAP gateway to provide
protocol conversion between WWW protocol stack
and WAP protocol stack.
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Mobile Web History

 WAP tries to utilize existing Internet protocols and

standards as much as possible

 For example XML, HTML, HTTP & TLS

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Mobile Web History
 Each layer of the protocol stack is designed to
be scalable and efficient.

 For example, in Wireless Transaction Protocol
(WTP), there is no explicit connection setup or
teardown

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Mobile Web History
 To describe the capabilities of a mobile device, WAP
has defined a user agent profile (UAProf)

 The capabilities of a mobile device are related to
software and hardware

 This includes things like processor type, memory
capacity, display size, browser type and version,
network type, etc.
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Mobile Web History
 The aim of using UAProf is to allow all elements of
the WAP infrastructure (i.e., content servers,
application servers, gateways, etc.) to provide mobile
devices with device-specific contents.

 A user agent profile is basically an XML document
containing information about hardware and software
characteristics of a mobile device and network to
which it will be connected.

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Mobile Web History
 The user agent profile of a mobile device is stored in
its manufacturer's server, called the profile
repository.

 In order to provide mobile devices with device-
specific contents, when a mobile device performs a
request to a server, the URL of its user agent profile
will be included in the header of the request
message.

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Mobile Web History
 Example of UAProf: For Sony Ericsson K750i, found
at:
http://wap.sonyericsson.com/UAprof/K750iR101.xml

 Open example XML

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Mobile Web History

 To reduce transmission time, WAP uses binary-coded

WML (wireless markup language) pages.

 Also WAP specifies a caching model and user agent

profile (UAProf) for efficient delivery of device-

specific content.

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Mobile Web History

 HTML pages are not suitable for use in mobile

devices with limited processor power and screen.

 Wireless Markup Language (WML) is designed to

describe data and the format that data should be

presented on mobile devices

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Mobile Web History
 WML is a tagged language.

 WML adopts a deck and card metaphor.

 Each WML document is made up of multiple cards,
and cards are grouped into a deck.

 WML pages can be encoded in a binary format
before transmission.

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Mobile Web History
<wml>

<card id=“Card1" title="First Card">
<p>
Hello World!
</p>
</card>

<card id="Card2" title="Second Card">
<p>
WAP is fun!
</p >
</card>

</wml>
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Mobile Web History
Figure: A WML deck
with two cards.

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Mobile Web History
 WMLScript is a scripting language which
complements WML.

 Similar to JavaScript for HTML

 WMLScript bytecode interpreter is compact in size,
which allows efficient execution of scripts will less
memory and processor requirements

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Mobile Web History
Three elements in a WAP architecture:
 Client: the WML browser in a wireless device.
It issues WAP requests to a server.

 Server: the entity which provides services and
where resources are located. This can be an
ordinary Internet-based server or a WAP-
capable server.

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Mobile Web History
 Gateway: provides protocol conversion
between the WWW protocol stack and the
WAP protocol stack, by using content
encoders and decoders

 Thus a gateway acts as a proxy server

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Mobile Web History

Figure: WAP infrastructure.

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Mobile Web History
 When protocol conversion is performed at the
gateway, it can minimize wireless
communication overhead at the client side.

 The gateway can also cache frequently
requested contents so as to reduce the
request - response time.

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Mobile Web History
 The architecture discussed so far is the common pull
architecture based on the client - server paradigm

 WAP system architecture also specifies a push
architecture to enhance the WAP services

 Here the server sends messages to the client without
explicit request from the client.

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Mobile Web History
 Push architecture is very useful in delivering
messages like instant news, email indication,
advertising etc

 In the push architecture, the server and the
gateway are called the push initiator (PI) and
the push proxy gateway (PPG), respectively.

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Mobile Web History

Figure: WAP push architecture

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Mobile Web History
WAP is designed to meet the following requirements

 Interoperability

 Scalability

 Efficiency

 Reliability

 Security

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Mobile Web History
 Mobile Web uses the plumbing of Desktop Web
and adds new MIME types, markup languages,
document formats, and best practices

 Web content provided is optimized for the small
screens, resource constraints, and usability
challenges of web browsers on mobile devices.

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Mobile Web History
The Mobile Web introduces new components into
the web ecosystem, including:
 Markup languages and styles optimized for
mobile devices
 MIME types that differentiate mobile markup
from desktop HTML
 Browser clients with a wide variety of capabilities
 Network proxies that further adapt your content
to cater for those clients
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Mobile Web History
 Rich Web 2.0 features such as JavaScript
frameworks and Asynchronous JavaScript and
XML (AJAX) must be used judiciously, or you
risk draining battery power.

 Operators frequently control and block traffic
to Mobile Web sites.

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Mobile Web History
 Transcoding proxies often attempt to reformat
mobile markup en route to a mobile browser.

 Defensive programming is essential to reduce
exposure to transcoders and mobile network
problems.

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Mobile Web History
 Mobile users are keenly goal-directed and
location-aware.

 Roaming in and out of coverage areas, mobile
users count network access problems among
the top factors affecting the Mobile Web
browsing experience.

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Mobile Web History
 The mobile browser is totally new & has
unique benefits, quirks, and workarounds.

 Partial and flawed implementations of web
standards are commonplace.

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Mobile Web History
 Improperly formatted web pages can have
drastic effects on mobile devices, including
crashing the browser or resetting the device.

 Advanced web features such as JavaScript and
AJAX are highly desirable but drain battery
life.

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Introduction to Mobile Internet

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