Network and method for delivering content while minimizing congestion costs by jointly optimizing forwarding and caching strategies

Embodiments include a unified framework for minimizing congestion-dependent network cost by jointly optimizing forwarding and caching strategies that account for link congestion between neighboring nodes. As caching variables are integer-constrained, the resulting optimization problem is a non-deterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard problem. Embodiments relax the optimization problem, where caching variables are real-valued. Embodiments include optimality conditions for the relaxed problem. Embodiments include an adaptive and distributed joint forwarding and caching method, based on a conditional gradient method. Embodiments elegantly yield feasible routing variables and integer caching variables at each iteration, and can be implemented in a distributed manner with low complexity and overhead. Over a wide range of network topologies, simulation results show that embodiments have significantly better delay performance in the low to moderate request rate regions. Furthermore, embodiments complement each other in delivering superior delay performance across the range of request arrival rates, compared to existing methods.