© 2016. The ever increasing requirements of new Internet applications are pushing to optimize the design of optical networks. A key design criterion in network design is the ability to recover from failures in an agile and efficient manner. Protection capabilities are highly required in optical networks since the failure of an optical link might potentially lead to a significant traffic loss. Under this context, Network Coding Protection (NCP) has emerged as an innovative solution to proactively enable protection in an agile and efficient manner by means of throughput improvement techniques such as Network Coding (NC). Nevertheless, the benefits of NC can be reduced by the negative effects of inaccurate Network State Information (NSI), which are common in dynamic scenarios.In this paper, we propose a novel proactive protection strategy based on NC jointly with a Path Computation Element (PCE) architecture called Predictive Network Coding Protection (PNCP). PNCP leverages predictive techniques in order to mitigate the negative impact of the inaccurate NSI on the blocking probability. In addition, PNCP computes resilient lightpaths with a low amount of network resources devoted for path protection.By means of extensive simulation results we show that in comparison with proactive protection strategies such as Dedicated Path Protection (DPP), and conventional dynamic NCP, PNCP reduces the blocking probability as well as the network resources allocated for path protection in dynamic scenarios.
