Ethernet ring protection is a new technology introduced in ITU-T Recommendation G.8032, which utilizes the generic Ethernet MAC functions. We introduce an alternative enhanced protection switching scheme to suppress penalty in the switching transient, in which the Ethernet MAC filtering database (FDB) is actively and directly modified by information disseminated from the nodes adjacent to failure. The modified FDB at all nodes are guaranteed to be consistent to form a complete new ring network topology immediately. This scheme can reduce the capacity requirement of the G.8032 by several times. This proposed scheme can be also applied in IP protection rings.