Patent ID: 11863514
Assignee: VMWARE LLC
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC G  H

Claim 0:
1. A method of load balancing data message flows across a plurality of secure connections, the method comprising:
at a first gateway device:
receiving a data message having source and destination addresses formatted according to a first protocol;
based on the source and destination addresses, selecting one of the plurality of secure connections for the data message, wherein each of the secure connections handles a first set of connections formatted according to the first protocol and a second set of connections formatted according to a second protocol that is an alternative to the first protocol, wherein said selecting comprises performing a load balancing operation to select one of the plurality of secure connections for the data message, wherein the first gateway device processes a plurality of data messages of a first traffic type and a plurality of data messages of a second traffic type, and as a result of the load balancing operation, the plurality of data messages of the first traffic type and the plurality of data messages of the second traffic type processed by the first gateway are evenly distributed across the plurality of secure connections; and
securely encapsulating the data message and forwarding the encapsulated data message onto a network, wherein the encapsulation comprises an identifier for the selected secure connection.