Abstract: Protection is a crucial aspect in optical networks, especially in Space-Division Multiplexing Elastic Optical Networks (SDM-EONs), in which heavy traffic is concentrated on only a few links, which implying on great information loss caused by link failures. Although previous studies have studied protection in SDM-EONs, no work has considered the joint use of protection schemes, traffic grooming, spectrum overlap, and adaptive modulation for these networks. This paper proposes an algorithm for Backup, Routing, Modulation, Spectrum, and Core Allocation (BRMSCA) to increase spectrum utilization efficiency in protected SDM-EONs. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which reduces the probability of bandwidth blocking by up to 23% in relation to those produced by other algorithms in the literature Ver menos