Wireless Session Protocol (WSP)

Wireless Session Protocol (WSP)

WSP provide connection-based services to the application layer. Basically a session is started, content
is exchanged and later on the session is closed. The session can also be suspended and resumed but
for now we just look at the simple case with no suspensions or resumes.
WSP is the WAP equivalent of HTTP and is based on HTTP/1.1. Within WSP (and HTTP) is the
concept of a request and a reply, each consisting of a header and body. The header is metadata and
consists of name-value pairs that specify information about the particular request or response. The
body is the payload for the WAE and typically consists of tokenised WML, compiled WMLScript or
images but can also contain raw WML text.
WSP also defines a server "push" transaction where the server can send information to the client
without the client requesting it. This may be used for broadcast messages or for real-time services
such as stock quotes or news headlines.
WSP as with other WAP layers specifies compression techniques to provide efficient transmission for
the request and response.
Some of the primitives that are supported by WSP are discussed later in this paper, under section 5.1
WSP Primitives.