I very much doubt it. Where did that factor of "half" come frome.
During lulls, you are constantly sending chaff packets. On average, you're halfway through transmitting a chaff packet when you want to send a real one. The system has to wait for it to finish before sending another. QED.
Ah, but if you generate unequal-length packets then they are vulnerable to length-analysis, which is a form of traffic analysis.
I'm talking about a stream, with packets embedded in it. For circuit-switched circuits, this is no problem. For a packet-switched network, you must packetize the stream, which is unrelated to the packets embedded in the stream. This is somewhat inefficent, which is why I suggested that it is more applicable ot something like PPP, SSH, or OpenVPN links, which are already virtual circuits. This is a fair criticism, but just think of the number of such circuit/packet conversions when someone uses a TCP virtual circuit over packet-based IP over an analog POTS link, which is itself a virtual circuit that is packetized and sent over a circuit (long-haul wirepair or fiber) in the telco network. If you explain to me how an eavesdropper can tell where plaintext packet begins or ends, then I'll agree with you that it is indeed vulnerable to length analysis.
A better solution would be to leave the encryption on and use constants (not PRNG output) for the chaff, as previously discussed.
That might or might not be a problem. With ECB, it's vulnerable to analysis (chaff is constant, so encryption of it is constant). With some modes, the amount you can transmit is limited (e.g. CTR mode). Modes that are based on a small window of previous plaintext, such as OFB, would be vulnerable too. It could very well be that it's a bad idea to send a lot of constant plaintext under other modes, as well. For example, if most of the data is constant, then you have a close approximation of known-plaintext.
The notion of synchronized PRNGs is IMHO crazy -- complicated as well as utterly unnecessary.
It's not necessary to run a PRNG on the receiver. You just have to be able to tell when you're looking at random data, or an encrypted version of an escape sequence and a valid packet, which can be recognized, as per your point 4a. If you find that it's not a legitimate packet, you treat it as PRNG data, and start looking for the encrypted escape sequence. However, with a 32-bit escape sequence, the chances of getting such a false positive are low. I personally think sending encrypted versions of constant data under the same key you use for real data is not crazy, but somewhat imprudent. Do you know what the unicity distance is? Have you read of attacks that require a large amount of ciphertext encrypted under the same key? -- http://www.lightconsulting.com/~travis/ -><- "We already have enough fast, insecure systems." -- Schneier & Ferguson GPG fingerprint: 50A1 15C5 A9DE 23B9 ED98 C93E 38E9 204A 94C2 641B