Abstract: An apparatus and method for steering and load-balancing mobile network traffic with user session awareness from multiple control and user plane protocols while understanding the load on the corresponding physical or virtual servers in cloud and virtual deployments is disclosed. This traffic could be monitored traffic, such as from optical taps, or network probes of mobile network interfaces, or port mirrors from network devices, or inline traffic when the load-balancer is logically placed inline in the network before the Virtual Network Functions, such as Virtual SGW (vSGW), Virtual SGSN (vSGSN), Virtual PGW (vPGW), Virtual MME (vMME), or Virtual Performance Enhancing proxy(vPEP). The apparatus and methods identified herein allow additional capabilities, such as ensuring that both directions of a protocol flow target the same physical or virtual server, or both control plane and user plane protocols of a flow are forwarded to the same server.