We present a prefix forwarding algorithm for content-based
publish/subscribe systems. Our algorithm performs only
one content-based match per message regardless of the num-
ber of routers (hops) traversed from the source to the desti-
nation. Moreover, prefix forwarding preserves the decou-
pling properties of publish/subscribe system. Prefix for-
warding does not put any restriction on the content of the
messages. The presented algorithm does not introduce any
false negatives and allows to tune the false positive rate to
balance the bandwidth and processing overheads. We pro-
vide experimental results confirming the properties of the
proposed approach.