In this paper we present the efficient burst reservation protocol (EBRP) suitable for bufferless optical burst switching (OBS) networks. The EBRP protocol is a two-way reservation scheme that employs timed and in-advance reservation of resources. In the EBRP protocol timed reservations are relaxed, introducing a reservation time duration parameter that is negotiated during call setup phase. This feature allows bursts to reserve resources beyond their actual size to increase their successful forwarding probability and can be used to provide quality-of-service (QoS) differentiation. The EBRP protocol is suitable for OBS networks and can guarantee a low blocking probability for bursts that can tolerate the round-trip delay associated with the two-way reservation.We present the main features of the proposed protocol and describe in detail the timing considerations regarding the call setup phase and the actual reservation process. Furthermore, we show evaluation results and compare the EBRP performance against two other typical reservation schemes, a tell-and-wait and a tell-and-go (just-enough-time) like protocol. EBRP has been developed for the control plane of the IST-LASAGNE project.