Connection Manager Application
4/8/2010
The Connection Manager application is ConnMgr.exe. It interacts with multiple device applications, such as Internet Explorer Mobile, to schedule and manage network connections. It maintains a list of all connection requests, their priorities, and the available Connection Manager configuration service providers per device.
When called by an application, the Connection Manager application must first determine the end-to-end paths from the device to the target network, for example, the Internet or a corporate network. Connection Manager does this by retrieving all possible connections from the Connection Manager configuration service providers, and finds all the paths from the device to the target network.
When the Connection Manager application has found all the possible paths from the device to the target network, it uses Connection Planner to determine the best connection to the target network. Connection Planner determines which connection requests should be connected at a specific time and which paths those requests should use to connect to their destination. For more information about the role of this component, see Connection Planner.
Once a proper connection has been determined and established by Connection Planner, the Connection Manager application schedules this connection, taking into account other scheduled connections and their priorities and security levels. It enables multiple applications to use the same connection on an interval basis instead of establishing a separate connection, which reduces the number of redundant connections.
For example, if five device applications request a connection to the same network at an interval of every half hour, this could result in up to 10 connections to the same location every hour. Connection Manager tries to schedule the connections so that only two actual connections are needed per hour.
When a network connection enters an idle state for a specified period, Connection Manager automatically disconnects the connection. This mechanism frees device applications from having to handle low-level connection tasks. When an application requests a scheduled connection to a certain destination network with a specified time period interval, the Connection Manager application wakes up the device application when a connection to the specified destination network is available, or at the end of each time period interval. In the former case, the application can make use of the available connection. In the latter case, Connection Manager does not establish a connection but just wakes up the application. It is up to the application to request Connection Manager to establish the connection to the destination network.