Enabling Disaster Resilient 4G Mobile Communication Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a virtualized, distributed 4G network architecture with device-to-device communication to enhance disaster resilience and reduce dependency on central network components.

Contribution

It introduces the Flexible Management Entity (FME) for virtualized EPC functionalities and a novel D2D communication scheme for proximity-based direct communication.

Findings

Enhanced network resilience to disasters.

Reduced dependency on central network infrastructure.

Improved communication continuity during disruptions.

Abstract

The 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the cellular technology expected to outperform the previous generations and to some extent revolutionize the experience of the users by taking advantage of the most advanced radio access techniques (i.e. OFDMA, SC-FDMA, MIMO). However, the strong dependencies between user equipments (UEs), base stations (eNBs) and the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) limit the flexibility, manageability and resiliency in such networks. In case the communication links between UEs-eNB or eNB-EPC are disrupted, UEs are in fact unable to communicate. In this article, we reshape the 4G mobile network to move towards more virtual and distributed architectures for improving disaster resilience, drastically reducing the dependency between UEs, eNBs and EPC. The contribution of this work is twofold. We firstly present the Flexible Management Entity (FME), a distributed entity which leverages on virtualized EPC functionalities in 4G cellular systems. Second, we introduce a simple and novel device-todevice (D2D) communication scheme allowing the UEs in physical proximity to communicate directly without resorting to the coordination with an eNB.