The invention relates to a message broker for managing subscription
requests in a multicast messaging system. The messaging system comprises
a plurality of publishers publishing information to the broker and a
plurality of subscribers subscribing to information received from one or
more publishers. The broker is able to receive a subscription request
pointing to topic information in which the requesting subscriber is
interested, the topic information defining a specific topic within a
topic hierarchy. The broker is able to parse the request to determine if
the request includes a wildcard and if the request does include a
wildcard, the broker instructs the requesting subscriber to listen on a
multicast address associated with the topic in the topic hierarchy which
precedes the wildcard.