  Minimizing total link cost in Information-Centric Network (ICN) by optimizing
content placement is challenging in both effectiveness and practicality. To
attain better performance, upstream link cost caused by a cache miss should be
considered in addition to content popularity. To make it more practicable, a
content placement strategy is supposed to be distributed, adaptive, with low
coordination overhead as well as low computational complexity. In this paper,
we present such a content placement strategy, UtilCache, that is both effective
and practicable. UtilCache is compatible with any cache replacement policy.
When the cache replacement policy tends to maintain popular contents, UtilCache
attains low link cost. In terms of practicality, UtilCache introduces little
coordination overhead because of piggybacked collaborative messages, and its
computational complexity depends mainly on content replacement policy, which
means it can be O(1) when working with LRU. Evaluations prove the effectiveness
of UtilCache, as it saves nearly 40% link cost more than current ICN design.
