Right, I am very familiar with that technique. However, if you'll note from my post, my design goals dictate that I establish the tunneled connection without the use of exec() or open() calls to system binaries like the SSH client binary (/usr/bin/ssh) or socat.
I am not looking for how to do this from the shell; I am looking to do this completely from within the confines of my Perl application, mostly for portability issues, but also because this "application" I'm working on will be implemented as a custom module in an API I am designing.
Dependence on external programs in this situation seems sloppy and hard to maintain. I am looking for my fellow developers to simply "use" my module and not have to worry about installing anything else besides other Perl modules.