RotorNet
William Maxwell Mellette, Rob McGuinness, Arjun Roy, Alex Forencich, George C. Papen, Alex C. Snoeren, George Porter · 2017
The ever-increasing bandwidth requirements of modern datacenters have led researchers to propose networks based upon optical circuit switches, but these proposals face significant deployment challenges. In particular, previous proposals dynamically configure circuit switches in response to changes in workload, requiring network-wide demand estimation, centralized circuit assignment, and tight time synchronization between various network elements--- resulting in a complex and unwieldy control plane. Moreover, limitations in the technologies underlying the individual circuit switches restrict both the rate at which they can be reconfigured and the scale of the network that can be constructed.