Commenced: 2013-5-15

Content-based routing has emerged as a popular paradigm in publish/subscribe systems for interactions between its system components (publishers and subscribers). Content-based rout-ing of published information is extremely bandwidth efficient as a publication is forwarded only to subscribers which have expressed their interest in this published content. Rules or filters are applied on the content at one or more routers/brokers to determine its path through the network. Most of the state of the art solutions consist of a distributed set of brokers scaling wide-area networks. However, in each of these solutions, filtering of events takes place at the application layer at dedicated brokers. This expensive filtering phase renders the advantages of content-based pub/sub with regards to bandwidth efficiency less significant as it results in higher end-to-end latency and lower throughput rates. To overcome this problem, software-defined networking may be used to build publish/subscribe systems where filtering of events can happen directly in the Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAM) of network routers. Initial work has shown that it is possible to map effectively a content-routing topology t