Due to the proliferation of wireless networks, there are a continually increasing number of wireless devices in use today. These devices include mobile telephones, smart phones, personal digital assistance (PDAs) with wireless communication capabilities, two-way pagers and the like. Concurrently with the increase of available wireless devices, software applications running on such devices have increased their utility. For example, the wireless device may include an application that retrieves a weather report for a list of desired cities or an application that allows a user to shop for groceries.
With the advent of dual or multi-mode devices (for example, devices with radio access technologies that provide access to wireless local area networks (WLAN) (e.g. access technologies under the Wi-Fi brand), wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) (e.g. access technologies under the WiMAX brand) and wireless wide area networks (WWAN) (e.g. cellular technologies like GSM/GPRS EDGE, UTMS, HSPA, CDMA, WCDMA, etc.) applications can have the ability to offer different usage models depending on the mode of wireless operation selected. Selection among the different radio access technologies may be driven by the different properties of the technologies such as bandwidth, range, cost, and power consumption, among other considerations. Selection may be an initial selection of a technology or a re-selection/evaluation particularly in view of a change to real-time conditions.
For instance, on a dual mode device, carrier voice traffic content can be accessed over GSM radio, while enterprise voice traffic content can be accessed over a WLAN radio. For a browsing application on the device, website content can be accessed from a WLAN, WMAN or WWAN (e.g. GPRS or EDGE) network. There are costs associated with application access from these different networks. There are also quality considerations such as the speed at which content can be delivered, or in the case of streaming media, the quality of service at which the content is delivered. It is therefore desirable to have a mechanism that seeks to optimize communications for multi-mode capable devices, that is, that seeks to improve communications for multi-mode capable devices.
For convenience, like numerals in the description refer to like structures in the drawings.