The GTP-C tunnel is enhanced to support tunnel-based session distribution to speed up the tunnel setup process and load-balance the sessions between the SPUs. The GTP-C tunnels and the GTP-C tunnel sessions are distributed by the SGSN tunnel endpoint identifier (TEID) of the tunnel. Use the set security forwarding-process application-services enable-gtpu-distribution command to enable the tunnel-based session distribution where the GTP-C traffic of different tunnels is spread across different SPUs.