There has been considerable research interest in the use of path protection techniques for the design of survivable WDM networks. In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm for dynamic lightpath allocation, using both dedicated and shared path protection. The objective is to minimize the amount of resources (wavelength-links) needed to accommodate the new connection. We have tested our algorithms on a number of well-known networks and compared their performance to “optimal” solutions generated by ILPs. Experimental results show that our algorithm generates solutions that are comparable to the optimal, but are significantly faster and more scalable than corresponding ILP formulations.