The rapid growth in client application demands, in terms of bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS), has motivated the deployment of the optical technology at Metro Access and Metro Core Networks. A new Ring-based Optical Network Architecture is being designed by Alcatel-Lucent with a view to offer a cost effective solution that provides also some added values in terms of reliability and performance. In this paper, we propose a packet size-based scheduling algorithm and a priority-based Packet Erasing Mechanism (PEM). These two mechanisms improve the performance (in terms of packet loss ratios and mean access delays) of the proposed optical ring architecture. Finally, through simulation works we present a performance analysis and comparison of three different optical ring architectures in competition. Obtained results provide interesting conclusions on the behavior and performance tendencies for each one of the studied architectures