Patent 8004973 was granted and assigned to Citrix Systems on August, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A performance enhancing proxy network device is configured to operate in a virtual inline mode, in which selected network traffic is redirected to and through the network device by a router using simple routing policies. In this way, the network device can be coupled to the router in series but can still operate as if it were physically connected inline.