The elastic optical network (EON) is an emergent technology allowing an efficient use of the optical spectrum. In an EON, optical spectrum ranges are adaptively allocated to an optical path according to the IP traffic demand, modulation format and path attributes. The key component of an EON is the dynamic control plane required for reaching full potential with respect to intelligent end‐to‐end optical path provisioning and IP traffic offloading. To this end, many studies have proposed GMPLS‐based control planes for an EON. Despite GMPLS' maturity, it may not be an ideal solution for the deployment in a real operational scenario due to its distributed nature and high complexity, especially for a unified control functionality in IP and EON multi‐layer networks. Alternatively, a software‐define networking approach enabled by OpenFlow, can provide the satisfactory flexibility and centralized intelligence for operators to control an EON, and can arguably match carriers’ requirements in terms of simplicity and manageability. In light of this, in this talk, we present an OpenFlow‐based unified control approach for dynamic optical path provisioning and IP traffic offloading in EONs. We detail the network architecture and required protocol extensions to OpenFlow while highlighting our experimental results on a real EON testbed.