This Recommendation provides an overview of generic aspects of a shared mesh protection (SMP) mechanism for connection-oriented layer networks that does not depend upon the presence of a control plane. This mechanism is targeted for mesh network architectures@ which offer further efficiencies in protection resource utilization. The primary characteristics of this path-based protection approach involve usage of pre-computation and pre-allocation of resources to maximize speed of recovery. The technology-specific shared mesh protection mechanisms will be defined in technology-specific Recommendation(s). This version of the Recommendation provides an architecture framework for SMP.