Abstract: Information centric networking (ICN) is a promising framework for evolving the current network architecture, advocating the ubiquitous in-network caching to enhance content delivery. Consequently, the cache replacement mechanism has been a hot topic in ICN research. In this paper, we first study the performance of the de facto standard cache replacement policy—least recently used (LRU). We find that if an interest for certain content is not satisfied at the first LRU cache node it hits, it is hardly satisfied in the following path. We then propose a pre-filtering based cache replacement policy to mitigate the cache degradation in multi-hop LRU cache. In the proposed policy, a pre-filtering LRU cache is settled in front of the real content store, which filters out the non-popular content and improves the hit-ratio of the real content cache. Extensive experiments based on the real-life topology show that our pre-filtering cache policy greatly improves the cache hit-ratio of cache node in typical ICN scenarios.