Burst contention can cause the burst loss in the optical burst switching (OBS) n etworks.Therefore,various contention resolution schemes have been proposed.Among them,the deflection routing is mor e attractive due to its low requirement for optical buffer in capability and quantity.However,the existing algorithms do not consider the deflected traffic′s impact on the original traffic of the deflection path or t he successful transmission probability of deflection traffic.Meanwhile,the offset-time deficit caused by deflection is ignored.Thus,in order to reduce the burst loss probability in OBS networks,a distributed backoff-channel deflectio n algorithm with load balancing (DBDF-LB) is pr oposed.It consists of two parts,i.e.,the deflection with load balancing and the backoff-channel buffering.Firstly,from the perspective of the network-wide l oad balancing,the optimal deflection path,on which the contention-failure burst is deflected with the minimum hops and the least burst loss probability, is selected.Secondly,the extra offset-time for the deflected burst is provide d through the backoff-channel buffering scheme.Finally,by numerical simulations ,compared with the classical shortest path deflection algorithm (SPDF),the DBDF-LB can obviousl y reduce the burst loss probability by about 23%－50%,and with a extra transport overhead less than one hop.