Patent ID: 7719995

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a plurality of unicast control flows at a network element from a plurality of clients; forwarding one of the unicast control flows with unchanged destination and source addresses to a server; performing deep packet inspection down to an application layer on the unicast control flows in real-time at line rates by bifurcating a subset from each of the unicast control flows and sending the subset for each of the unicast control flows to a compute plane of the network element for processing; determining in the compute plane whether replicating a unicast content flow is appropriate based on the subsets of the unicast control flows; receiving the unicast content flow from the server at the network element in response to forwarding the one of the unicast control flows with the unchanged destination and source addresses; and replicating the unicast content flow at the network element as a plurality of replicated unicast content flows for transmission to the plurality of clients, if replicating is determined to be appropriate, wherein the network element operates as a fully transparent intermediary by retaining the source address identifying one of the clients corresponding to the one of the unicast control flows with the unchanged destination and source addresses forwarded to the server and by retaining an address of the server as a source address in each of the plurality of replicated unicast content flows sent to the clients.