Abstract: Systems and methods are disclosed that promote asynchronous communication through customized Internet protocol headers. This asynchronous communication is promoted by encoding additional information into the header of at least one data packet. The formatting and content of the packet header may be determined through an application programming interface (API). In addition, the header of this data packet may be of a variable length. The length of the data packet may be dependent upon the requirements of the API. In some embodiments, the header comprises sufficient information that, when interpreted by the API, promotes asynchronous communication.