Improving energy resilience in cellular base stations and critical infrastructures: A comprehensive review from multidimensional aspects

The energy demands of cellular base stations have escalated significantly across successive network generations, with 5G and 6G deployments imposing substantially higher power requirements. In addition, the increasing frequency of extreme climate events has exposed the vulnerability of cellular base stations and their adjacent critical infrastructures, leading to cascading disruptions in communication and essential services. A critical analysis of previous surveys identifies the absence of an integrated framework that concurrently addresses service continuity, energy coordination, and adaptive risk mitigation. To address this gap, this review introduces multidimensional emergency resilience improvement techniques that adopt a unified, layered approach to achieve optimal resilience across electrical and communication systems. This approach enables resilient system design by hardening cellular base stations for robust communication services, providing guidance on energy regulation for hybrid and distributed power coordination, and implementing uncertainty-handling schemes for predictive and adaptive system control. This article comprehensively analyzes each dimension, identifies existing research gaps, and proposes an integrated energy-routing and control structure that ensures uninterrupted operation of cellular base stations and critical infrastructures, even during grid blackouts or natural disasters.