[development] How to control background processes from inside Drupal?

Hello there, Is there any way to start/stop background processes from inside Drupal? I'm currently writing a module that has to continuously monitor a socket connection for events coming from a remote server. I thought about using hook_cron(), but I'm afraid that the infinite (or continuous) loop of my event handler would tie out other modules that use hook_cron(). Another alternative would be to use batch api, but do batch processes run in the background? Thanks in advance, Leo