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.