Network survivability is a key issue in reliable WDM optical network design to assure the service guarantee to customers. Rather than conventional connection link/path/sub-path based protection switching scheme, in this paper we propose protection group (sub-mesh)-based approach to fast recover traffic from single/multiple link/node failures. By the group-based spare resource discovery and exploitation, the local channel utilization of network will be maximized and hence enhance the overall quality of protection. The simulation results show that the local resource utilization and restoration time are efficient under heavy load in the dynamic traffic environment over dense mesh backbone networks.