Abstract In this paper, we deal with the wavelength assignment and the converter placement problem in wavelength-routed optical WDM Mesh networks. Our objective is to try to assign wavelengths in an efficient manner with/without wavelength conversion to get a very low blocking probability and optimize the performance of the overall network. Thus, we implement and compare the performance of two proposed algorithms namely DWA “Dynamic Wavelength Assignment” and SWA “Static Wavelength Assignment” with well-known algorithms. We first present a literature review about previously proposed approaches, and then we introduce and evaluate our implemented approaches. We also discuss the wavelength converter placement problem in mesh networks. We finally corroborate our theoretical findings through extensive simulations.