In this paper we incorporate the rerouting of backup paths to the Call Admission Control algorithm of Sub-Graph Routing Protection (SGRP). Sub-Graph Routing Protection with On-Arrival Planning (SGRP-OAP) has the two-fold benefit of strongly reducing the blocking probability of the protected system while eliminating the physical rerouting of established connections, which is a major drawback of the original proposal of SGRP. The new scheme is so capacity-efficient that, for all investigated topologies, at low traffic intensity the blocking probability of the system protected against single link failures is the same as the blocking probability of the unprotected system. This is possible because the new protection scheme is extremely effective in using the idle network capacity to provide backup paths. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.164 129136Ramaswami, R., Sivarajan, K.N., (2002) Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective, , Morgan Kaufmann PublishersRamamurthy, S., Mukherjee, B., Survivable WDM mesh networks, part I-protection (1999) Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'99, pp. 744-751Mohan, G., Murthy, C.S.R., Somani, A.K., (2001) Efficient algorithms for routing dependable connections in WDM optical networks, 9 (5), pp. 553-566Frederick, M.T., Somani, A.K., A single-fault recovery strategy for optical networks using subgraph routing (2003) Proc. ONDM'03, pp. 549-568. , in, FebDatta, R., Frederick, M.T., Somani, A.K., Sub-graph routing: A novel fault-tolerant architecture for shared-risk link group failures in WDM optical networks (2003) Proc. DRCN'03, , in, OctMello, D.A.A., Pelegrini, J.U., Savasini, M.S., Pavani, G.S., Waldman, H., Interarrival planning for sub-graph routing protection in WDM networks (2004) Proc. ICT'04, , in, Aug