This document describes a mechanism to address the requirement to support protection of Label Switched Paths (LSPs) in an MPLS Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) mesh topology. The shared mesh protection mechanism enables multiple protection paths within a shared mesh protection domain to share protection resources for the protection of working paths by coordinating protection switching operations according to the priority assigned to each end-to-end linear protection domain. This document is a product of a joint Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) / International Telecommunications Union Telecommunications Standardization Sector (ITU-T) effort to include an MPLS Transport Profile within the IETF MPLS and PWE3 architectures to support the capabilities and functionalities of a packet transport network as defined by the ITU-T.