Enabling disaster-resilient 4G mobile communication networks

4G Long Term Evolution is the cellular technology expected to outperform previous generations and to some extent revolutionize the experience of users by taking advantage of the most advanced radio access techniques. However, the strong dependencies between user equipment, base stations, and the Evolved Packet Core limit the flexibility, manageability, and resilience of such networks. If the communication links between UE-eNB or eNB-EPC are disrupted, mobile terminals are unable to communicate. In this article, we reshape the 4G mobile network to move toward more virtual and distributed architectures to improve disaster resilience and drastically reduce the dependency between UE, eNBs, and EPC. First, we present the flexible management entity, a distributed entity that leverages on virtualized EPC functionalities in 4G cellular systems. Second, we introduce a novel device-to-device communication scheme allowing the UE in physical proximity to communicate directly without resorting to coordination with an eNB or EPC entity.