An exponential growth in data traffic is expected in mobile data networks. So called “Smart phone” devices as well laptop and other mobile computing devices are becoming a major source of mobile data traffic. The explosion of Internet and other data traffic on wireless networks has created an increasing need for offloading data traffic.
Mobile data offloading, also called data offloading, is the use of complementary network technologies, such as wireless local area networks (“WLAN”), for delivering data originally targeted for cellular networks. WLAN networks are typically hotspot networks and they are thus not available everywhere. Thus, in order to use WLAN networks, a mobile device typically need to constantly scan its environment in order to determine if a WLAN network is available for use by the mobile device.