Application-level content-based routing using XML is a key technology for decentralized publish/subscribe systems. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to support the efficient dissemination of XML packets when allowing the clients to specify their subscriptions with path queries. The proposed method is based on Chord-liked distributed hash table (DHT) scheme. The integration of XML packet filtering and finger table based routing in structured overlay networks provides an elegant base for the proposed SONNET system, upon which the optimization techniques are studied. Analytical and empirical results have shown that the coupling of disseminating and routing in publish/subscribe systems could offer robustness and extensibility for the systems, while the decoupling of the two aspects brings more scalability and workload balance. Extensive empirical studies have demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms previous efforts for content-based routing.