In this paper, we study a new control plane protocol, called Differentiated ABR (D-ABR), for flow control and service differentiation in optical burst switched networks. Using D-ABR, we show using simulations that the optical network can be designed to work at any desired burst blocking probability by the flow control service of the proposed architecture. This architecture requires certain modifications to the existing control plane mechanisms as well as incorporation of certain scheduling mechanisms at the ingress nodes; however we do not make any specific assumptions on the data plane for the optical core nodes. Moreover, with this protocol, it is possible to almost perfectly isolate high priority and low priority traffic throughout the optical network as in the strict priority-based service differentiation in electronically switched networks.