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
Rights Reserved.

The Need for Mobile Web

Rights Reserved.

 Limitations of mobile phones
 Limited Processor Power and Memory

 Limited Battery Life

 Limited Input and Output Facilities

 Low Bandwidth

 Unpredictable Availability and Stability
Rights Reserved.

 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.
Rights Reserved.

 Users consume mobile services differently.

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

Rights Reserved.

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

Rights Reserved.

 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.

Rights Reserved.

Figures: Feature
Phones

Rights Reserved.


 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.

Rights Reserved.

 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.

Rights Reserved.

Figure: Smartphone
- iPhone

Rights Reserved.

 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.
Rights Reserved.

Figure: Personal
Digital Assistants

Rights Reserved.

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

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

Rights Reserved.

 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.

Rights Reserved.

Figure: Distribution
of Mobile Handsets

Rights Reserved.

 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.

Rights Reserved.

 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.

Rights Reserved.

 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.

Rights Reserved.

Mobile Web History

Rights Reserved.

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
Rights Reserved.

Mobile Web History

 In 2002, the WAP Forum consolidated into the Open

Mobile Alliance (OMA) and the specification work

from WAP continues within OMA

Rights Reserved.

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).
Rights Reserved.

Mobile Web History
Figure: The WAP
protocol stack

Rights Reserved.

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.
Rights Reserved.

Mobile Web History

 WAP tries to utilize existing Internet protocols and

standards as much as possible

 For example XML, HTML, HTTP & TLS

Rights Reserved.

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

Rights Reserved.

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.
Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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

 Open example XML

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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>
Rights Reserved.

Mobile Web History
Figure: A WML deck
with two cards.

Rights Reserved.

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

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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

Rights Reserved.

Mobile Web History

Figure: WAP infrastructure.

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

Mobile Web History

Figure: WAP push architecture

Rights Reserved.

Mobile Web History
WAP is designed to meet the following requirements

 Interoperability

 Scalability

 Efficiency

 Reliability

 Security

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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
Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

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

 Partial and flawed implementations of web
standards are commonplace.

Rights Reserved.

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.

Rights Reserved.

Introduction to Mobile Internet

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked (7)

Similar to Introduction to Mobile Internet (20)

More from Shujaa Solutions Ltd (6)

Recently uploaded (20)

Introduction to Mobile Internet