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) employing an advanced data compression scheme. Though optional in WAP , 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 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 by over 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.