Optical bypass circuits are selected and created with a desired amount of traffic on each circuit to offload from the IP routers, the maximum possible amount of traffic. In a first phase, each node in a network independently determines the maximum number of optical bypass circuits, configured to their maximum capacity, to as many destinations, that could possibly originate at that node. The determination is made by aggregating traffic from a given traffic matrix. The optical bypass circuit transports traffic that originates at the node plus transient traffic that the node receives from other nodes. In the second phase, the node will eliminate an optical bypass circuit found in the first phase if any of its parent nodes created a necessarily longer optical bypass circuit to the same destination. In addition, if a descendent node has more aggregate traffic to fill more bypass circuits than the parent node, then the extra optical bypass circuits from the descendent node are also created.