The Dispatcher is essentially a single-process server which drives the state machines. It listens at a well-known port (separate for HEC and SEC) and monitors the reception of a control message. On receiving a message, it parses the header for information about the path and the identifier of the connection and hands off the payload information to the appropriate state machine for further processing. Once the state machine has finished the processing of the message, the Dispatcher returns back to monitoring the well-known port.