Patent ID: 8838724

Claim:
A network component comprising: a caching policy engine configured to receive network policy information associated with content object portions to be transferred between a source node and a destination node and compute a caching policy based on the network policy information, wherein the caching policy engine comprises a global caching policy component configured to: communicate with a remote global caching policy component in a remote network component to receive partial content caching information comprising constraints describing the content object portions to be transferred between the source node and the destination node and describing a probability that the content object portions to be transferred can be received by the destination node, wherein the network component is not the destination node; and compute the caching policy based on the network policy information and the partial content caching information; an inter-cache data transfer component coupled to the caching policy engine and configured to fetch at least one of the content object portions in accordance with the caching policy; a storage engine coupled to the inter-cache data transfer component and configured to cache at least one of the content object portions; and an eviction algorithm component coupled to the storage engine and configured to select cached content object portions for eviction from the storage engine.