During the operation of various types of network environments, such as, for example, wide area networks (WANs), thousands of traffic flows may be setup and torn down. Network devices may utilize substantial processing resources to provide setup, window control, and buffer management functionalities. Additionally, bandwidth allocation and congestion avoidance becomes problematic.
Various techniques have been implemented to address these issues. For example, a single Transport Control Protocol (TCP) connection (known as “tunnel mode”) may be utilized. The advantages of “tunnel mode” include low processing overhead and high bandwidth efficiency. However, a disadvantage of “tunnel mode” is the loss of application visibility, since all application packets are transmitted through the same port number. In a different approach, different TCP connections between systems may be utilized for different end-to-end TCP flows. An advantage to this approach is that application visibility is maintained. However, the disadvantages to this approach are high overhead and less bandwidth, processing and memory efficiency.