One of major optical network problem is to route and to assign the wavelength efficiently because of its wavelength reuse characteristics and information transparency. By utilizing the trade-off scheme between the blocking probability and setup time of the requested route, priority-based RWA (PRWA) approaches has been studied for WDM networks by introducing a priority criterion which depends on calculation of hop counts and volume of the traffic. The simulation result shows that PRWA technique reduces both the blocking probability (approx. 20%) as compare with non-priority based RWA scheme and the average end to end delay near about (10 msec.) as compare with Adaptive routing (AR) at various traffic load conditions. This approach also results in cost-effectiveness as well as reduction in the complexity of the network in comparison to earlier reported techniques