Method and system for co-operative on-path and off-path caching policy for information centric networks

A system for improving network performance by co-operative caching content in a multi-router information centric network (ICN) architecture, the system comprising:

• a plurality of edge routers of the multi-router network;
• wherein each of the plurality of edge routers is configured to:
• receiving a request for content from a plurality of end users;
• checking a local cache for the availability of the content;
• serving the request if the content is available and forwarding the request to an ICN manager if the content is not available;
• caching an incoming content received from a source router, being an original source or a nearest intermediate router having the content, when present on a path from source router to an end user, based on availability of the local cache to perform on-path caching;
• and replacing a stale contents of the local cache with the incoming content upon finding that the local cache is full and updating the ICN Manager with each caching update by a central router;
• the ICN manager and/or ICN resolver to forward the request of content, to the source router;
• a plurality of intermediate routers present in the path from the source router to the end user to cache the content received from the source router based on availability of the local cache to perform on-path caching;
• means for computing score of the incoming content to cache at each of plurality of edge routers of the multi-router network, wherein the computed score is used to tag cache lifetime of the content;
• means for replacing stale cached content of the at least one of plurality of edge routers, wherein the replacement is based on the lower cache lifetime of the staled cached content and incoming content;
• and
• the central router of the multi-router network to cache one or more contents and one or more stale contents of each of the intermediate routers and edge routers to perform off-path caching.