Abstract: Traffic involved in maintaining a set of connection oriented sessions between end stations in a network is managed to optimize and reduce the polling traffic needed to maintain the connection oriented sessions across a common link between edge devices. At a first edge device, a member of a set of connection oriented sessions is selected as a polling session. Request polling traffic of that polling session is forwarded from a first edge device to the second edge device. All other polling traffic from other members of the set of connection oriented sessions is blocked at the first edge device. The set of connection oriented sessions is maintained in response to polling traffic of the selected polling session. A similar algorithm is executed at the second edge device to manage the traffic in both directions across the common link.