The present disclosure is directed towards systems and methods of steering packets received by a multi-core device serving as a tunnel endpoint. A device including a plurality of cores identifies a core corresponding to a request to transmit to a destination via a tunnel. The tunnel is established between the first tunnel endpoint and a second tunnel endpoint. The device identifies, from a port allocation table, a source port based on the identified core, a first IP address of the first tunnel endpoint, a second IP address of the second tunnel endpoint and the destination port to steer a response to the request to the identified core. The device modifies a packet of the request to include in an outer header of the packet of the request, a first tuple identifying the first IP address, the second IP address, the destination port and the identified source port.