Optical burst switching (OBS) is an emerging technology that allows variable size data bursts to be transported directly over DWDM links. In order to make OBS a viable solution, the wavelength scheduling algorithms need to be able to utilize the available wavelengths efficiently, while being able to operate fast enough to keep up with the burst incoming rate. Unfortunately, horizon scheduling cannot utilize the voids created by previously scheduled bursts, resulting in low bandwidth utilization. To date, Min-SV is the fastest scheduling algorithm that can schedule wavelengths efficiently. However, its complexity is O (log m) and it requires 10 log ( m) memory accesses to schedule a single burst. This means that it can take upto several microseconds for each burst request, which is still too slow to make it a practical solution for OBS deployment. In this paper, an efficient scheme has been proposed for optimizing channel utilization in OBS networks. In the proposed approach, a burst is represented by an interval of time. The process of scheduling a number of bursts, thus, turns to be a process of fitting a set of the corresponding time intervals on a channel time line that represents a channel-time resource. By doing so, the scheduling process can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. Then, graph theory is applied to schedule as many non-overlapping intervals as possible onto the channel time line. The underlying concept of the proposed scheduling scheme is that of briefly delaying the scheduling of a burst so that a much better decision can be made about a number of bursts all-together. This scheme is shown, through simulations, to improve performance in terms of burst loss probability, channel utilization, fairness-control and data throughput over existing schemes. Thus the proposed scheme is well suited for high performance networks in terms of reliability.