US Patent 7139268 Performance of intermediate nodes with flow splicing

A method and apparatus for splicing a first data flow inbound to an intermediate node and second data flow outbound from the intermediate node transforms the first data flow and the second data flow into a single composite data flow originating at the source of the first data flow and terminating at the destination of the second data flow. The method allows any other data flows associated with the first or second data flow, such as other data flows associated with connections that encompass either the first or second data flow, to remain unaffected by the splice. The method allows intermediate nodes in a network to influence data flow between a pair of nodes at or above the transport layer without incurring all the overhead commonly associated with transport and higher layer processing.