The problem studied in this paper consists of two parts, a burst mode study and a packet scheduling algorithm applied to access nodes in a multiservice optical packet-switched network. The burst mode study aims to show how the performance of intermediate nodes is afected by the way in which packets are grouped or sequenced at the access nodes of the network. Our interest in packet scheduling is based on the idea of using the electronic memory at the access nodes, in order to improve the performance at the core of the optical network. Existing packet scheduling algorithms are typically designed to support delaysensitive applications in a high speed networking environment. In this work we present a new packet scheduling algorithm (so-called RMPS for Rate Monotonic Packet Scheduling) that reduces resource contentions at the core nodes of the network. Our algorithm is derived from RMS (Rate Monotonic Scheduling) algorithm which is designed at the origin for "process scheduling" in the kernel of operating systems. We use simulations to evaluate the performance of the network when using the proposed packet scheduling mechanism