The paper presents a priority-aware algorithm to preserve higher priority requests over optical mesh networks. The paper discusses an algorithm to improve resource utilization and availability performance of shared mesh optical networks. The algorithm benefits from service level agreement (SLA) parameters negotiation to further reduce the blocking rate, improve availability satisfaction rate, and increase the chance of accommodating more number of high-priority connection requests compared to shared-mesh protection algorithms over wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks. The algorithm enables service providers to provide fairly high quality connections based on the customers' requests at the lowest cost.