If your concern is to have secure tunnels between hosts, you should probably use spiped rather than SSH, since it uses a separate TCP connection for each pipe -

If your concern is to have secure tunnels between hosts, you should probably use spiped rather than SSH, since it uses a separate TCP connection for each pipe -- this avoids the "connection dropped" problem and also the "multiplexing many connections over one TCP connection" performance hit. Also, spiped is way simpler and more secure than SSH. (On my servers, I tunnel SSH over spiped, to protect the sshd from attacks.)