CSCI5939 Independent Study
Wireless Application Protocols (WAP)

Fall 2002
Study list & due dates
Projects
References & links


Objectives:  The focus of this independent study is the development of wireless applications using the Wireless Application Protocols (WAP).  The student taking this independent study will participate in setting up a wireless server and other necessary components, such as a micro browser on a mobile device.  The sample applications involving the server and clients will be developed using J2ME and WAP.

Evaluation: Three software development projects + a final report + oral presentations + participation.

Team projects & reports
 30%
Individual presentations
 15%
Individual final report
 35%
Participation
 20%

Projects:  The projects are team-based.  Each team should consist of 2 or 3 members. A team submits a report for each of the individual projects.  Each individual, however, must submit his/her own final report, which summarizes the projects, including how the systems were set up, problem descriptions of the projects, design of the applications, source codes of the applications, screen snapshots, lessons learned, and possible future extension of the work.  

Presentations:
Each week one or two persons will sign up to present a selected article.  The presentation is followed by group discussion.  You are highly encouraged to use Powpoint or any presentation tools to prepare your presentation slides.  The presenter must prepare and distribute handouts of his presentation to the rest of the class at the beginning of the presentation.  

How to cite published work in your papers?
Important! Read the above before writing your papers or reports.
To obtain articles from the ACM Digital Library:
Use any of the lab computers in the campus to download the articles from http://www.acm.org/dl .
Meeting Time & Place:    Wednesdays 2-4pm (Delta 236)


Study list & due dates
Week (Date)
 		Papers
 		Due
 		Presenter / Slides + additional material
1 (8/28)
  • Introductory handouts:
    • 3G Mobile Technology
    • imode versus WAP
    • Securing the Wireless Enterprise.  RSA Security web seminar slides.

2 (9/4)
3 (9/11)
4 (9/18)
5 (9/25)
  • Canceled...

6 (10/2)
 Project 1
7 (10/9)
 Design of project 2
8 (10/16)
  • "Client-server computing in mobile environments". Jin Jing , Abdelsalam Sumi Helal , Ahmed Elmagarmid.   ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR). June 1999.  Volume 31 Issue 2.
9 (10/23)
  • "WAP traffic: description and comparison to WWW traffic".  Thomas Kunz , Thomas Barry , James P. Black , Hugh M. Mahoney.  Proceedings of the 3rd ACM international workshop on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems . August 2000.
Project 2
10 (10/30)
  • "Software security and privacy risks in mobile e-commerce".  Anup K. Ghosh , Tara M. Swaminatha.   Communications of the ACM.  February 2001.  Volume 44 Issue 2.
 Design of project 3
11 (11/6)

12 (11/13)
  • Presenter: Kashif Syed
  • The presentation slides.
Demo of the sample codes
13 (11/20)
  • "Mobile Code and Distributed Systems: The performance of public key-enabled kerberos authentication in mobile computing applications"
    Alan Harbitter , Daniel A. Menascé
    Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security November 2001
 Project 3
  • Presenter: 
  • The presentation slides.
  • Demo of project 3
14 (11/27)
 Thanksgiving holiday.  No meeting.

15 (12/4)
Final report

Project 1: System set-up and initial testing
A. (20 pts) Download the Java 2 Platform Micro Edition, Wireless Toolkit, from http://java.sun.com/products/j2mewtoolkit/index.html .  Set up the development environments, especially the emulator, on a computer and try out a sample wireless application.  Write a readme.txt file to outline the steps a new user needs to take in order to download, install, and test the J2ME Wireless Toolkit.
Note: Check out the J2ME Development Tutorial , and the Secure Java MIDP Programming Using HTTPS with MIDP .
B. (10 pts) A WAP gateway is a software that converts HTML pages to WML formats such that wireless clients would be able to access the content of HTML based web pages.  Search the web to find and download a WAP gateway.  Install and run it.  Try to use a mobile device emulator to access a HTML page by going through a WAP gateway.  Attach screen snapshots to show how the emulator connects to the HTML page.

C. (20 pts) Download and install the Nokia Activ Server (from http://www.nokia.com/ ).  Read the "Getting Started Guide".  Use a mobile device emulator to access a sample WML page from the Activ Server.  Attach the WML page and screen snapshots to show how the emulator connects to the WML page.

D. (50 pts) Identify a sample WAP application.  Design the overall architecture of the application using UML.  Hand in the following items:
  1. A description of the application.  Clearly describe the nature of the application, what you plan to accomplish in this class, what would be the major challenges of developing the application, and what technologies and tools you plan to use to answer those challenges .
  2. A high level application architecture using UML.  Clearly identify the classes, their attributes/methods, and the associations among the classes.  Include an inheritance hierarchy if necessary.
  3. For each of the technologies that would be employed in your project (J2EE, J2BC, WAP, WML, et. al.), describe its fundamental mechanism (50 words) and its role in the application.
  4. Break the development of the project into two parts: Part 1 shall be completed in project 2, and part 2 in project 3.  Describe the outcome from each of the two parts, in terms of functionalities of the application.
Project 2: Part 1 of your project.

Project 3: Part 2 of your project.

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) et. al.
WAP, J2ME and Wireless Java
Wireless Device Security
More information regarding wireless applications and security are available at http://sce.uhcl.edu/yang/teaching/csci5939sum02/csci5939WirelessSecurity.htm .