Retransmission in optical burst switching networks is a solution to recover data loss by retransmitting the dropped burst. The ingress node temporarily stores a copy of the complete burst and sends it each time it receives a retransmission request from the core node. Some retransmission schemes have been suggested, but uncontrolled retransmission often increases the network load, consumes more bandwidth, and consequently, increases the probability of contention. Controlled retransmission is therefore essential. This paper proposes a new controlled retransmission scheme for loss recovery, where the available bandwidth of wavelength channels and the burst lifetime are referred to as network conditions to determine whether to transmit a dropped burst. A retrial queue‐based analysis model is also constructed to validate the proposed retransmission scheme. The simulation and analysis results show that the controlled retransmission scheme is more efficient than the previously suggested schemes regarding byte loss probability, successful retransmission rate, and network throughput.