Techniques are provided for zero copy accelerated processing of packets received at a network device according to a session oriented protocol. Each packet comprises a header field and a payload field. Data in the header field of a byte is evaluated to determine whether a sequence number in the header field is equal to an expected sequence number for a given flow of packets. When the sequence number in the header field is equal to the expected sequence number, header data from the header field is stored in a header ring comprising a plurality of socket buffers and payload data is directed to an application buffer pool according to a pointer in a streaming data ring. When the sequence number in the header field is not equal to the expected sequence number, the header data and the payload data are stored in the header ring.