the network are encapsulated in higher level protocols prior to being sent to the edge device the virtual destination address may be associated with a process on the edge device or a process on another device in the interior of the network higher level protocol designations including transport protocol designations accompanied by a port number and application protocol designations are retrieved from an extended virtual address registration messages arriving at the edge device are determined by the network layer to contain a higher level protocol and are passed up the internet protocol model stack to a higher layer the higher layers of the edge device such as the transport layer and the application layer may be accessible and therefore configurable to a non systems administrator thus allowing the message to reach the intended virtual destination address application_number US 36755303 A description the illustrative embodiment of the present invention provides a method of encapsulating messages sent to a virtual destination address in higher level protocols the higher level protocols are specified in a virtual address registration for the destination virtual address that is stored in a lookup table for the virtual network the encapsulation of the messages in the specified higher level protocol enables the messages to reach their intended destination despite the presence of packet filtering devices on the edge of a network the encapsulated message may also make use of compression encryption authentication of data and similar measures to further modify the message fig1 depicts an environment suitable for practicing the illustrative embodiment of the present invention an electronic device 2 is part of a physical network 20 the devices on the physical network 20 are addressed using ip addresses in the 152 70 0 0 24 range the electronic device 2 includes the five layers.