Abstract
Content-based routing is an important research area as content access has become the dominant service in today's Internet. In content-based routing, the requests for content accesses are forwarded by "content routers" that examine the content (payload) of each request packet. Some of the current content-based routing approaches adopt hardware-based solutions for higher performance, while their usability is limited by high implementation cost and the lack of flexibility to adapt to changing requirements. On the other hand, software-based design approaches are not able to provide high processing capability due to inherent (software) overhead and thus fail to attain higher performance. As a result, there is a need for a high-performance and flexible solution that provides an efficient and intelligent content-based routing mechanism. To address this gap, programmable network processors that are capable of processing packets at wire speed can be used. Unfortunately, none of the existing content-based routers uses network processors. This paper aims at commencing a new era in content-based routing design, where a content-based routing framework efficiently uses a network processor and will be intelligent enough to apply different routing algorithms on the fly based on the content.