Although designing a virtual topology for all-optical WDM wide-area networks has been extensively studied and several algorithms have been proposed, these algorithms assumed error-free communication between two nodes. However, noises from optical amplifiers and optical cross-connects can degraded the signal, resulting in a nonzero bit-error rate. In this paper, we investigate the effect of physical limitations on the virtual topology design. We show that for side-area all-optical networks where transmission distance is fairly long, virtual topology design algorithm that can determine the locations of opto-electronic(OE) and electro-optic(EO) conversions to set up a connection request with a high BER in a multihop manner.