In this paper, it is considered the broadband backbone optical networks with wavelength routing and circuit switching used to build long-range wide area networks. In this type of network, if there is an available and acknowledged connection request, it is necessary to determine the optimal path between the optical communication nodes in the network. This also requires the assignment of an optimal set of wavelengths along the selected route between these nodes. This paper takes into account the multichannel optical communication networks with spectral multiplexing. Four different routing algorithms are modeled and analyzed for which their weight functions are determined to take into account various factors, such as the total distance of the individual routes, the total number of available wavelengths for a given route and how many of them are available for use. It is studied and compared the performance of the proposed algorithms in a multichannel optical network in terms of blocking probability.