The growing energy consumption has posed new challenges for the future development of networks. Some earlier work has proposed solutions to improve energy consumption based on the existing control plane, for example, node/links sleeping. This study presents a new possibility to reduce network energy consumption by proposing a new integrated control plane structure utilising Software Defined Networking technologies. The integrated control plane increases the efficiencies of exchanging control information across different network domains, while introducing new possibilities to the routing methods and the control over quality of service (QoS). The structure is defined as an overlay generalised multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) control model. With the defined structure, the integrated control plane is able to gather information from different domains (i.e. optical core network and the access networks), and enable energy efficiency networking over a wider area. In the case presented, the integrated control plane collects the network energy related information and the QoS requirements of different types of traffic. This information is used to define the specific group of traffic's(flow's) routing behaviours. With the flexibility of the routing structure, results show that the energy efficiency of the network can be improved without compromising the QoS for delay/blocking sensitive services. 1 Introduction The network operations today feature a multi-domain, multi-layer design and management. The control mechanisms are separated horizontally between core, access and home networks, and separated vertically between application, transport and physical layers. These separations lead to high operational/energy cost, low network efficiency and high l a t e n c yi np a t hp r o v i s i o n i n g ,a n dh a v ec r e a t e dd i f ficulties for designing protocols to communicate between different network domains. Particularly, the emergence of high bandwidth or low latency demand applications, that is, high definition television, voice over IP (VOIP), have posed new challenges for bringing down the energy cost while keeping the quality of service (QoS) level. A more unified, intelligent cross domain controlling mechanism is needed to meet these challenges. The Software Defined Networking (SDN [1]) concepts have been considered as new methods to cope with the problems. The concept of SDN technologies are to extract the network control plane from the data plane, while enabling the communications through various interfaces. The programmable SDN control plane provides the flexibility in designing new functionalities and providing new services, which are independent of the underlying physical infrastructure. Designing such an integrated control plane using SDN concepts are discussed in this work. A translucent optical core network is included, together with a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) structure as the access network part. GMPLS is used as the underlying control mechanism for the optical core network. Optical network u...