Preconfigured protection cycles (p-cycles) provide recovery times for mesh networks that are near the recovery times of BLSR ring networks while providing lower spare-to-working capacity ratios. However, the efficiency of p-cycles defined by the spare-to-working capacity ratio is affected by the topology of the network. An efficient method for adding links to an existing network is required to take advantage of pcycles. In this work, a heuristic called p-cycle cut saturation (PCUT) is proposed.

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... It extends the wellknown cut saturation heuristic to strategically add links to an existing network to lower the spare-toworking capacity ratios in networks using p-cycles. PCUT is applied to a 28-node network to add spans and lowers the spare-to-working capacity ratio by 20%.