Abstract: Content networking is an emerging technology, where the requests for content accesses are steered by “content routers” that examine not only the destinations but also content descriptors such as URLs and cookies. In the current deployments of content networking, “content routing” is mostly confined to selecting the most appropriate back-end server in virtualized web server clusters. This invention presents a novel content-based routing architecture that is suitable for global content networking. In this content-based routing architecture, a virtual overlay network called the “virtual content network” is superimposed over the physical network. The content network contains content routers as the nodes and “pathways” as links.