Optical burst switching architectures without buffering capabilities are sensitive to burst congestion. The existence of a few highly congested links may seriously aggravate the network throughput. Proper network routing may help in congestion reduction. The authors focus on adaptive routing strategies to be applied in labelled OBS networks, that is, with explicit routing paths. In particular, two isolated alternative routing algorithms that aim at network performance improvement because of reactive route selection are studied. Moreover, a nonlinear optimisation method for multi-path source-based routing, which aims at proactive congestion reduction is proposed. Comparative performance results are provided and some implementation issues are discussed.