  The study of protection techniques, such as pre-provisioning (off-line) and
provisioning (on-line), has been explored in several ways in the optical
network literature. In the new Elastic Optical Network (EON) paradigm, the
pre-provisioning techniques were still little explored. Preprovisioning implies
the prior allocation of resources in the network for the transport and
protection of future connection demands, while the provisioning implies the
allocation of resources when the demand arrives in the network. Applying
preprovisioning reduces the downtime experienced by a connection after a
failure, which will reduce unavailability and potentially avoid penalties for
violation of Service Level Agreements (SLA) established with client networks.
This work aims to explore the main protection techniques and evaluate their
efficient in the EON scenario. The performance evaluation show that the use of
preprovisioning techniques are more efficient, significantly reducing the
network unavailability and bandwidth usage in EON networks. Our solution has an
unavailability 40 times lower than shared solutions being only 4% above the
optimum.
