Forwarding in a content-based network

This paper presents a new algorithm for content-based forwarding, an essential function in contentbased networking. Unlike in traditional address-based unicast or multicast networks, where messages are given explicit destination addresses, the movement of messages through a content-based network is driven by predicates applied to the content of the messages. Forwarding in such a network amounts to evaluating the predicates stored in a router’s forwarding table in order to decide to which neighbor router the message should be sent. We are interested in finding a forwarding algorithm that can make this decision as quickly as possible in situations where there are large numbers of predicates and high volumes of messages. We present such an algorithm and give the results of studies evaluating its performance.