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

This paper presents a novel proxy architecture for wireless application protocol (WAP) 2.0 employing an advanced data compression scheme. Though optional in WAP 2.0, a proxy can isolate the wireless from the wired domain to prevent error propagations and to eliminate wireless session delays (WSD) by enabling long-lived connections between the proxy and wireless terminals. The proposed data compression scheme combines content compression together with robust header compression (ROHC), which minimizes the air-interface traffic data, thus significantly reduces the wireless access time. By using the content compression at the transport layer, it also enables TLS tunneling, which overcomes the end-to-end security problem in WAP 1.x. Performance evaluations show that while WAP 1.x is optimized for narrowband wireless channels, WAP 2.0 utilizing TCP/IP outperforms WAP 1.x over wideband wireless channels even without compression. The proposed data compression scheme reduces the wireless access time of WAP 2.0 by over 45% in CDMA2000 1XRTT channels, and in low-speed IS-95 channels, substantially reduces access time to give comparable performance to WAP 1.x. The performance enhancement is mainly contributed by the reply content compression, with ROHC offering further enhancements.