Contention is inherent to optical burst switching; this may lead to some burst loss, which could be fatal for some kind of applications. In This work we propose a combination of contention reduction through congestion control and bursts retransmission to eliminate completely bursts loss. The simulation results indicate that this scheme can transform an optical burst switching to a robust burst forwarder. Simulation results also show that the retransmission technique is particularly suitable for metropolitan or local area network where the additional delay incurred by the retransmission is negligible.