Performance study of Internet-based data services over WAP and Gopher protocols: Master's thesis

This master thesis compares two different approaches to wireless service systems. The protocols used in this work are the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and the old Gopher protocol. High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD) cellular technology is used for analyzing the performance and efficiency of the aforementioned protocols. Two test setups are introduced where the first one is to purely measure the effective throughput over HSCSD and the other one to compare the semantic structure of the two protocols. The goal is also to study if the WAP protocol stack is a good approach as a wireless communication protocol and to compare its features to Gopher system. A general description of the main trends, needs and challenges in the development of wireless technologies is also given.