[nucleardog]

I mean, at this point you're effectively defining a new network protocol (or, you will be shortly once you implement ways to work around all the other issues you're going to run into). I'd go all-in from the start and start every packet with a magic string/byte sequence of your own, a length, and probably a version code just to make it extensible.

Or see if there's an existing protocol you can abuse for what you want. If it's transactional, you get a pretty big ecosystem of battle-tested clients/servers/proxies/etc if you use HTTP.