Using dial-up lightpaths for high-speed access

We propose a dial-up optical access architecture that allows an end host dynamically to request and receive a high-speed circuit for connection to its Internet service provider's router. We carry out an analytical comparison of the current leased-line architecture and our proposed dial-up architecture for access networks. It shows significant capacity savings, for example, savings of 39% at 50% traffic load for a call blocking probability of 0.5% assuming 3000 hosts share the optical link. With a call queueing model, we demonstrate that even if the circuit is held for long durations in the dial-up architecture, bandwidth savings are possible over the leased-line architecture.