A recovery scheme where a base station monitors state of interoperation with a primary exchange. When the primary exchange becomes unavailable, active services may be lost, but the base station sends an activation request message to a secondary exchange that has access to base station configuration information of the base station. The secondary exchange uses the base station configuration information to activate the base station, and user terminals in the base station cell may begin to registrate to the system. Recovery capability of communications can be achieved with optimized use of network resources.