Minimum interference routing schemes are good options for achieving fewer working-path request rejections. They improve the vast majority of the current QoS routing proposals. However, when backup paths are added there is no guarantee of achieving a similar performance. In this paper, we analyze the suitability of these routing schemes in protected network scenarios. The main objective was to define the network scenarios in which the required performance can be achieved using only minimum interference. Some simulation results are presented to consider different network topologies and different routing schemes and to show the main drawbacks and advantages of using minimum interference schemes in protected network scenarios. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.