Techniques are presented in which a new information element signaling priority of a management entity is included in a setup (e.g., S1-Setup) response or configuration update message sent by a management entity to a base station entity. The base station entity interprets this priority information along with the relative capacity information in an appropriate way to load-distribute the traffic/calls to highly preferable management entity instances (at a local site) when they are available, and switchover/failover to lower preference management entity instances (at a remote site) when there is a local site outage/failure or insufficient capacity in a geo-resilient pooled network.