The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) recently standardized several Industrial Ethernet solutions that introduce the fieldbus concepts within Ethernet based networks. In addition, the IEC 62439 standardized a set of redundancy management protocols, including the Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP). In this way, IEC standards provide a variety of Ethernet-based solutions for satisfying both temporal and redundancy management requirements of Industrial Area Networks (IANs). In this paper, after a detailed study and implementation of MRP, two factors are identified that have an important impact on the protocol performance: the offset time and the physical detection time. A method is then provided to calculate a threshold to the network recovery time. Finally, extensive simulations and experimental measurements are performed to accurately evaluate the effect of the aforementioned factors on the protocol performance.