A datagram-oriented UDP protocol is used for communication between tunnel gateways in a wide area network. Lightweight remote client accesses network services using TCP tunneling. Each remote client maintains one or more UDP/IP+DTLS communication channels to a single member of the gateway group. Gateway servers belonging to the gateway group form some interconnection topology linking each gateway server to each other gateway server, whereby each gateway server maintains a communication channel with every other gateway server in the gateway group.