Tunneling is a mechanism used to aggregate payloads from a network protocol at or below the tunneling layer into a single packet. A user-space application establishes a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) tunnel and encapsulates an end-to-end TCP payload into a TCP segment for transmission over a TCP connection. This enhanced TCP tunnel eliminates TCP meltdown and can be used over any network which supports TCP. The calling application either identifies the parameters of an existing TCP socket or establishes a new TCP socket. A modified transport layer uses the identified TCP connection in forming the enhanced TCP tunnel. The enhanced TCP tunnel manages the data transmission on the TCP stack to eliminate TCP meltdown.