The Flexible Time-Triggered (FTT) paradigm, proposed at the university of Aveiro in Portugal, makes it possible for distributed embedded systems(DES) to exchange real-time data in a flexible fashion, that is, it ensures that changes in the communication requirements can be managed. FTT has been implemented in different technologies and topologies. In this document we make a general description of the FTT Switched Ethernet (FTT-SE) protocol, an implementation of FTT on top of an Ethernet network with a star topology, that is, with a switch. To properly describe this protocol, we first discuss the FTT basics. Specifically, we explain how it organizes the communication, the kind of scheduling performed for the different types of traffics, the general design of the modules carrying out the protocol operation and other relevant features. After that, we focus on FTT-SE for which we expand all the topics discussed previously
for FTT. Finally, we provide, in the form of appendixes, the list of the FTT-SE messages and an example scenario of one relevant FTT-SE mechanism.