In view of the disadvantages of the conventional P-cycle protection algorithms

e.g.long running time and low resource utilization ratio

this paper presents a novel heuristic algorithm

which takes redundancy as the evaluation criterion and

in combination with the unprotected link ratio

efficiently constrains the expansion of the P-cycles when there are few unprotected links so that highly efficient P-cycles can be calculated in only one step and the optical networks 100% protected.Simulation results obtained in the pan-European COST239 network and the New Jersey LATA network show that this algorithm can effectively reduce the number of the P-cycles to be configured

cut down the running time and improve the network resource utilization ratio.