  A disaster may not necessarily demolish the telecommunications
infrastructure, but instead it might affect the national grid and cause
blackouts, consequently disrupting the network operation unless there is an
alternative power source(s). In this paper, power outages are considered, and
the telecommunication network performance is evaluated during a blackout. Two
approaches are presented to minimize the impact of power outage and maximize
the survival time of the blackout node. A mixed integer linear programming
(MILP) model is developed to evaluate the network performance under a single
node blackout scenario. The model is used to evaluate the network under the two
proposed scenarios. The results show that the proposed approach succeeds in
extending the network life time while minimizing the required amount of backup
energy.
