In this paper, we summarize the contributions of the Doctoral Thesis entitled Protection in Elastic Optical Networks with Spatial Multiplexing. This thesis proposes solutions for protection of elastic optical networks with spatial multiplexing, aiming at reducing the blocking of requests and the improvement of resource utilization. For this, we take into account the use of different schemes to paths protection, adaptive modulation, traffic grooming, spectrum overlap in protection paths, minimum interference routing and multipath routing. The algorithms proposed will allow the provisioning of protection in optical networks that will transport much greater volumes of traffic than do the current networks.