Abstract: To effectively reduce the energy consumption for elastic optical network, an energy saving strategy based on software defined networking is proposed. The strategy is designed to reduce the huge switching power of lightpath termination and re-establishment. Firstly, the software defined networking technology and back propagation neural network model are used to predict the traffic situation of each lightpath in the network. Then, for the lightpath on which the traffic transmission has been completed and is about to be removed, a holding time is set according to the prediction result. Setting the holding time for the idle lightpath can avoid the re-establishment of the lightpath between the same source destination node pairs and eliminat the switching power consumption. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy can reduce the total energy consumption by 45% while maintaining a bandwidth blocking ratio at levels comparable to strategies which do not consider the switching power.

Key words: elastic optical network, lightpath holding time, energy consumption