In this talk, I will present a global motivation for my PhD research topic. Initially the talk will introduce the concept of optical networks and show the motivation for my work. Then the polling models and their relation with communication routing are described. Next I will briefly explain the model which we working on. It is a vacation-type queueing model, and a single-server multi-queue polling model, with the special feature of retrials. Just before the server arrives at a station there is a deterministic glue period. Customers (both new arrivals and retrials) arriving at the station during this glue period will be served during the visit of the server. Customers arriving in any other period leave immediately and retry after an exponentially distributed time.The relation of this model to optical switches is explained and then the queue length analysis is shown.