Automatic and on-demand Mobile Network Operator (MNO) selection mechanism demonstration

The use of smartphones has been increasing in the last few years. Many open standards and accessible Application Programming Interfaces (API) make it easier for developers to achieve their ideas and many communities, such as xda developers, or stackoverflow provide good questions and answers concerning mobile application development. Questions on how to search for available MNOs and how to switch a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) programmatically on Android devices already arose in 2010. Until the work concluded here, an answer of those questions have not been published. The main reason is that there are no methods provided in the public Android API that allows for performing such tasks. In this work here two mechanisms allowing for (a) an automatic and on-demand MNO selection and (b) an MNO look-up mechanism have been developed for the Android platform. The efficiency of these mechanisms has been evaluated with respect to power and time consumption.