There is an increasing trend towards using switched Ethernet in real-time distributed systems due to features like absence of collisions and high throughput. Nevertheless, a few problems persist, in particular related to priority inversion and limited length in queues. In this paper we focus on a protocol which uses a master-slave technique over standard switched
Ethernet in order to overcome such problems, namely FTT-SE protocol. We present an improved response time analysis for such a network and we compare, analytically and with simulations, the results achieved with Network Calculus on a worst-case scenario. We show that our proposed response time analysis gives tighter bounds compared to Network Calculus. Moreover, we
compare the performance of different solutions to scale the FTT-SE protocol with respect to the bandwidth utilization. Finally, we propose a new architecture to improve the average performance of master-slave switched Ethernet networks.