Over the past few decades, content-based publish/subscribe has been primarily implemented as an overlay network of software brokers. Even though such systems provide the possibility of bandwidth efficient expressive filtering in software, they cannot match up to the performance (in terms of end-to-end latency and throughput) of communication protocols implemented on the network layer. To exploit network layer performance benefits, recently, content-based publish/subscribe was realized using the capabilities of Software-defined Networking (SDN). While SDN allows line-rate forwarding of events by content filters directly installed on switches, it suffers from inherent hardware limitations (w.r.t. flow table size, limited availability of bits in header fields) that adversely impact expressiveness of these filters, resulting in unnecessary network traffic.

In this paper, we strike a balance between purely application-layer-based and purely network-layer-based publish/subscribe implementations by realizing the first hybrid content-based middleware that enables filtering of events in both layers. Moreover, we provide different selection algorithms with varying degrees of complexity to determine the events to be filtered at each layer such that unnecessary network traffic can be minimized while also considering delay requirements of the middleware. Our hybrid middleware offers full flexibility to configure it according to the performance requirements of the system. We provide a detailed performance evaluation of the proposed selection algorithms to determine their impact on the performance of the designed hybrid middleware which we further compare to state-of-the art solutions.