Described herein is a session reuse approach that reuses a session already established on a remote participant to execute an autonomous transaction. The session is reused in a manner that avoids affecting the session's state in a way adverse to later execution of the containing transaction. When beginning an autonomous transaction on a local participant, a request to initiate an autonomous transaction on a remote participant is deferred or not sent at all if the containing transaction is a distributed one. The request may be sent later, piggybacked to another message, using a piggyback messaging system. When ending an autonomous transaction, a local participant may send a request to a remote participant requesting that the remote participant commence execution of its respective containing transaction. The request is piggybacked to another message, and is thus transmitted without having to transmit the request separately, avoiding a message round trip.