 all the nodes of the ring that the protection wavelengths has been reserved by the nodes involved in the failure SO that no other node will try to use them. After the successful handshake of the nodes at the two ends of the affected path, which Convergent Network Management and Control Plane also has the scope of verifying that the protection path works correctly, the affected optical channel is switched on the protection wavelengths in both the directions. It is clear that there is a complex activity to perform if the protection mechanism involves shared resources to coordinate protection switching in a network. Under a functional point of view, this operation of advertising and handshaking could also be forced by the man- agement plane that can naturally reach all the nodes of the data plane. However, protection has to be carried out generally within 50 ms, or a similar short time, thus an intervention of a SW manager running on a centralized workstation is not feasible and real-time protocols are needed. However, all the protection mechanisms are controlled and managed by the manage- ment plane. Just for an example, if protection switching does not work, it is the manage- ment plane to detect and to manage the result, invoking if is the case protection on an upper layer or resorting to restoration coordinated by the control plane. A particular circumstance is created in the case of control plane protection in conse- quence of a failure either of a CC or of a control plane connection. In this case, only the source and destination connection controllers are involved in managing protection and it is suggested to avoid shared protection techniques not to be obliged to create protocols of a sort of meta-control plane. Differently from protection, the restoration is completely managed by the control plane. During restoration, the control plane uses specific protocols to build new routes for the connections that have been disrupted from a failure starting from the spare capacity avail- able in the network. In the AS