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Switched Ethernet arose in the last decade as a means to increase global throughput with parallel switching paths, segment the network and create isolated collision domains, thus reducing the non-determinism of the original shared Ethernet. However, COTS Ethernet switches still suffer from a few drawbacks that affect negatively their real-time communication capabilities. For example, there can be overflows in ports queues with consequences across ports, priority levels and virtual LANs, and the number of priorities is too short for any kind of priority-based scheduling. Moreover, switches present extra latencies and jitter due to the need to interpret frame addresses and also due to different internal architectural solutions. In this paper we propose using the Flexible Time-Triggered communication paradigm to enhance the temporal behavior of Ethernet switches with respect to periodic streams. We explain the system architecture and we present a formulation of the global periodic traffic scheduling problem handled by the FTT master. Simulation and experimental results show the advantages of using such synchronized framework.