In this paper, we present an analytical model to investigate the blocking performance of distributed wavelength reservation protocols in dynamic WDM networks. This model extends the approach of [S. Arakawa et al., Proceedings of ITC-CSCC, (Sado, Japan, July 1999), pp. 828--831] in two aspects: firstly we take into account the contention between the two end nodes of bidirectional links in bidirectional wavelength reservations. Secondly, we make a distinction between the effects of different kinds of network delays, which include signaling transmission delay, signaling processing delay, and optical cross-connects (OXC) operation delay. As an application, we use our method to analyze the performance of two different signaling processing schemes, namely forward after cross-connect (FAXC) and forward before cross-connect (FBXC) [M. Goyal et al., Technical Digest of OFC2002 (Anaheim, CA, Mar. 2002) pp. 489--490]. The accuracy of our analytical model is validated by discrete-event simulations. Numerical results show that the FBXC scheme can give a lower network blocking probability than FAXC, and the efficiency of FBXC becomes more significant as the OXC operation delay increases.