USENIX Association NSDI ’12: 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation 239 OSA: An Optical Switching Architecture for Data Center Networks with Unprecedented Flexibility

Data center networks (DCNs) form the backbone in-frastructure of many large-scale enterprise applications as well as emerging cloud computing providers. This paper describes the design, implementation and evalua-tion of OSA, a novel Optical Switching Architecture for DCNs. Leveraging runtime reconfigurable optical de-vices, OSA dynamically changes its topology and link capacities, thereby achieving unprecedented flexibility to adapt to dynamic traffic patterns. Extensive analytical simulations using both real and synthetic traffic patterns demonstrate that OSA can deliver high bisection band-width (60%-100 % of the non-blocking architecture). Im-plementation and evaluation of a small-scale functional prototype further demonstrate the feasibility of OSA.