THROUGHPUT FOR A SINGLE VPN CONNECTION USING MULTIPLE PROCESSING CORES

The techniques described herein increase the throughput of a single VPN connection by creating multiple outbound and/or inbound Security Associations (SAs). For instance, two or more different SAs can encrypt outbound data packets to be sent over the VPN connection to a remote device. Moreover, two or more different SAs can decrypt inbound data packets received over the VPN connection from the remote device. Each of the SAs can be bound to a different processing core via the use of a Security Parameter Index (SPI) identifier. Consequently, inbound data packets communicated over a single VPN connection from a remote device to a physical host in a VPN gateway can be distributed amongst multiple processing cores for decryption purposes. Further, outbound data packets to be communicated over the single VPN connection from the physical host to the remote device can be distributed amongst multiple processing cores for encryption purposes.