S. Wei and A.G. Jost (Canada)
Mobitex, Socket, Internet, Protocol.
Mobitex is a cost-effective and efficient packet-switched wireless network. Its worldwide deployment and pure data network nature make it very suitable infrastructure for wireless Internet access. Since the Internet is built on the Internet communication protocol stack (TCP/IP), in order to achieve wireless Internet access these protocols should also be used extensively in the wireless environ ment. Unfortunately, most resource-constrained wireless terminals (e.g. mobile phones, two-way pagers, etc.) are not equipped to support the full functionality of the Internet communication protocol stack. Due to the lack of universal APIs and protocol standards, how to integrate these wireless terminals into the global Internet is a challenge. In this paper we advocate a Virtual Socket Architecture which is a client-gateway-server oriented approach for wireless Internet access in a Wireless WAN (Mobitex). This approach uses a gateway to separate the management of the behaviorally different wired and wireless worlds and to provide the wireless terminal with an access point to the Internet. It also allows the use of a lightweight protocol stack with a set of virtual socket interfaces on the wireless terminal, while keeping the entire Internet communication infrastructure within the gateway. A specially designed protocol is applied for the wireless link to manage the bi-directional transmission of the socket operation requests and response.
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