This study aims at highlighting the Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problems in WDM Optical networks and describes the Routing Algorithms and their performance comparison. Since routing decisions play an important role in evaluating the blocking performance of a network it is critical to choose a wavelength assignment scheme that should take into account its compatibility with the chosen routing protocol in addition to its blocking performance. This study presents problems in Wavelength Assignment, describes various Routing schemes and different approaches to solve both the static and the dynamic RWA problems. RWA algorithms' role is to assign a light-path (a route and a wavelength) to incoming calls in a network. RWA algorithms block calls if a continuous wavelength from source to destination cannot be found (wavelength blocking), thus degrading the performance of All Optical Networks, by call blocking. The failure of RWA algorithm to find an available wavelength on all links from source to destination causes congestion resulting in packet loss. This study examines the RWA algorithms and their problems in WDM Optical networks. The various measures taken to improve the blocking performance of WDM optical networks are also studied. We compared the performance of two wavelength assignment schemes, the Random wavelength assignment and the First-Fit wavelength assignment scheme via simulation. It was observed that the Random wavelength assignment algorithm performs well under low load, while for high load First Fit algorithm performs better. © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2014.