Patent ID: 8750304

Claim:
A method, comprising: detecting, at a first Wide Area Network (WAN) device deployed at an edge of a WAN, a packet passing through the first WAN device, wherein the packet was sent from a node which is in communication with the WAN and wherein the packet has a first network destination address for another node connected to the WAN; identifying, by the first WAN device, the first network destination address to which the packet is addressed; obtaining from memory accessible to the first WAN device an identifier of a third WAN device associated with the first network destination address; and marking the packet with the identifier to generate a marked packet that identifies the third WAN device, wherein the marked packet is examined by a second WAN device and passed to a server associated with the third WAN device in accordance with the identifier, and wherein the identifier of the third WAN device is derived from a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) synchronization-acknowledgement (SYN-ACK) detected by the first WAN device in response to a TCP SYN packet sent by a computing device associated with the first WAN device.