Metropolitan area and long-haul networks are migrating toward the deployment of optical mesh technologies. This requires, among other things, a new generation of highly intelligent protection and restoration mechanisms to perform functions of protection and bandwidth management. We introduce an architecture that provides differentiated protection services across multiple layers of network hierarchy. A connection at any client layer can request a protection against resource failures at any lower layer. A key aspect of the architecture is the hierarchical tree organization of shared risk link group (SRLG) resources. They represent routing-related failures across all layers of protocol stack. The architecture is very scalable in terms of communicating link-state and bandwidth information between adjacent layers. SRLG trees are used to aggregate this information and provide a summary to the client layer. We discuss the requirements and challenges for routing and signaling mechanisms in order to support the proposed architecture. The complexity of this architecture is evaluated and compared with the complexity of a nonhierarchical alternative.