This thesis work focuses on designing a survivable IP-core network with the minimal investment of spare capacity. A span-oriented spare capacity allocation (SCA) scheme is proposed to satisfy customers' availability requirements in the end-to-end (E2E) sense. The novelty of the proposed SCA scheme is that it meets the E2E availability requirements despite the lack of knowledge of E2E bandwidth by employing protection rings covering all links in the network. Different ring selection methods are presented and also compared from the aspect of network redundancy and LP feasibility which provide more flexibility to the design. The proposed SCA algorithm further minimizes total cost of spare capacity by incorporating partial protection within the proposed architecture. The simulation results show that it can significantly reduce the spare capacity consumption depending on the availability. The proposed SCA scheme also performs better in terms of redundancy than that of two other dominant methods available these days.