It is usually assumed that optical burst switching (OBS) networks use the shortest path routing along with next-hop burst forwarding. The shortest path routing minimizes delay and optimizes utilization of resources, however, it often causes certain links to become congested while others remain underutilized. In a bufferless OBS network in which burst drop probability is the primary metric of interest, the existence of a few highly congested links could lead to unacceptable performance for the

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... tire network. We take a traffic engineering approach to path selection in OBS networks with the objective of balancing the traffic across the network links to reduce congestion and to improve overall performance. We present an approximate integer linear optimization problem as well as a simple integer relaxation heuristic to solve the problem efficiently for large networks. Numerical results demonstrate that our approach is effective in reducing the network-wide burst drop probability, in many cases significantly, over the shortest path routing.