An OTA provisioning system typically encompasses content publication and management, access control, installation (and upgrading) of applications, and tracking the use of applications (content) for billing purposes. In actual use, OTA is not quite so simple.
The Content Repository - As the name implies, this is the repository of all the application descriptors and applications that are available for download. A single download server might support one or many OTA protocols. It has two main functions: it provides properly formatted menus, often written in WML or HTML, that list the applications currently available for download, and it provides access (sometimes controlled) to the applications. The Download Server - Also called a provisioning portal, or server, or vending machine, this is a host, visible in the network, that typically runs a web server and has access to a content repository - in its simplest form any Web site can serve as a provisioning portal. The Network - This is any appropriate wireless network, which may include a radio network and a WAP gateway, for example. The discovery application may be browser-based or a native application, so long as it shares a common provisioning protocol with the download server for example, for MIDP OTA this protocol is HTTP. Client device with a discovery application - The client device must have software that allows the user to locate applications at a particular provisioning portal on the network, and to choose which applications to download - this software is referred to as a discovery application (DA). In its simplest form, OTA is pretty straightforward, as Figure 1 illustrates:įigure 1 - Simplified View of an OTA Provisioning Architecture OTA Overviewįrom the mobile client's perspective, in concept OTA is simply a matter of finding an interesting application on the Web and initiating its download over the wireless network. Note that even though this article will concentrate on OTA provisioning of applications, specifically Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) applications (MIDlets), some of the concepts covered also apply to the provisioning of other types of content. 
We'll also look at the server impacts - how any web site can be used as a download server, and how the new J2EE Client Provisioning specification looks at a high level. In this article we'll go over what OTA is, how it works, and how it affects you, for both MIDP 1.0 and MIDP 2.0. The term over-the-air provisioning (OTA) describes the ability to download and install content over a wireless network, typically on demand.
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