This paper presents the first quantitative evaluation of the role of routing computations on performance when mobility is introduced to a content-based routing network. Additionally, the paper identifies the factors that affect the performance of a distributed publish/subscribe architecture supporting mobile publishers, formalizes publisher mobility protocols for distributed publish/subscribe systems, and develops and evaluates protocols that reduce the costs associated with supporting mobile publishers in publish/subscribe systems. Our results show that ignoring route computation time paints a false picture of the scalability of content-based routing networks, but that with appropriate protocols the adverse effects can be mitigated. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.4 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Distributed Systems—Distributed applications; C.4 [Computer Systems Organization]: Performance of Systems General Terms Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Performance Keyw...