Abstract: In Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical networks, lightpaths are high-capacity all-optical channels. A single fiber failure can lead to the failure.of all the lightpaths traversing the fiber, and results in significant loss of traffic. Therefore, effective survivability mechanism is needed to minimize the data loss. This paper proposes an Adaptive Sub-Path Protection (ASPP) algorithm for WDM mesh networks with traffic grooming capabilities. The idea of ASPP is to segment each working path into several equal length sub-paths, and to compute their protection paths respectively. Based on dynamic traffic with different load, the performance of ASPP has been compared with traditional protection approaches via simulations. The results show that ASPP can make the tradeoffs between the resource utilization and recovery times.