An unified formulation for planning of protection resources in mesh-networks as an integer linear program (ILP) is developed. Various protection schemes have been considered and the similarities among them are worked out. The objective is to minimize the required total capacity. The ILP formulation turns out to be especially useful for shared protection, whereas for dedicated protection simple exact algorithms do exist. Case studies for Pan-European networks of the COST action 266 have been performed and the results are presented.