SMP, a new standard being developed within the ITU and IETF, provides both better economic efficiency and performance in handling multiple failures than other network resiliency technologies. Implementing SMP in hardware ensures a sub 50 ms performance, which is necessary to meet stringent SLAs as networks scale to 100 Gbps and 8 Tbps per fiber with thousands of services. 

SMP resolves the conflict between the need to minimize cost and meet SLAs6. The shared mesh approach is more cost effective, maintains protection levels that are better than 1+1 protection and delivers cost performance similar to that of best-effort restoration methods.