In order to meet the need of demand response(DR)for real-time and reliable communication connections and solve the communication protection problem of the DR multi-cast service in power communication network
a P-cycle protection algorithm for power DR service is proposed. By evaluating the importance of DR multi-cast links
the edge expansion algorithm and the cycle combination algorithm are used to optimize the configured P-cycles
so as to realize preferential protection of DR important links. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the number of P-cycles and the protection failure ratio
and improve the reuse ratio of protection resources
which is able to provide strong support for the fast recovery of communication failure in DR service.