Routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) is a widely discussed design problem in the optical networks literature. Physical layer impairments (PLI) degrade the quality of transmission (QOT) of a propagating optical signal inside the optical fiber and they have a significant impact on the RWA process. 3R regeneration, which is based on the expensive optical-to-electronic-to-optical (OEO) conversion technology, is a popularly used technique to restore the degraded QOT of an optical signal. In order to minimize both capital and operational costs, it is highly desirable to use a translucent optical network, in which the 3R regenerators are sparsely yet strategically placed. This thesis presents a novel impairment-aware RWA approach, called best first search RWA (BFS-RWA), for dynamic connection requests, in a translucent optical network. BFS-RWA is based on the A* best first search algorithm and guarantees an optimal solution (i.e. using the least possible number of regenerators)
