I don’t see much value. Each packet has a source port as well as a destination port. The source port is usually random and is the port the server responds to. Proxies, nats, firewalls all handle port numbers very efficiently and the tcp and udp headers themselves only use 16-bits + 16-bits on the wire. These are aligned to a 32-bit boundary which helps efficient hardware and software parsing. There’s no variable length to worry about and waste more bytes on. There’s no string encodings like Utf-8.
