A Hardware Architecture of an XML/XPath Broker for Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Systems

In this paper, we present a novel hardware-based XML/XPath broker architecture for content-based Publish/ Subscribe systems. Our broker architecture includes processors to parse XML published content and XPath subscriptions, a matching engine to match subscriptions against publications, and components to forward either subscriptions or notifications based on content. While software techniques are traditionally employed, our broker architecture performs concurrent tasks and provides high performance. Moreover, the architecture can work efficiently in mobile networks by employing small-sized memory modules. Our results, obtained from a prototype FPGA, reveal that processing and matching hundreds of subscriptions can be achieved in some cases with a throughput exceeding 350 Mbps, if a 50-MHz clock is used.