Energy efficiency with QoS control in dynamic optical networks with SDN enabled integrated control plane

The paper presents energy efficient routing algorithms based on a novel integrated control plane platform. The centralized control plane structure enables the use of flexible heuristic algorithms for route selection in optical networks. Differentiated routing for various traffic types is used in our previous work. The work presented in this paper further optimizes the energy performance in the whole network by utilizing a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for route selection. The trade-off between energy optimization and QoS for high priority traffic is examined and results show an overall improvement in energy performance whist maintaining satisfactory QoS. Energy savings are obtained on the low priority traffic whilst the Quality of Service for the high priority traffic is not degraded.