An Architectural Design for Brokered Collaborative Content Delivery System

Abstract: Advances in web technologies have driven massive content uploads and requests that can be identified by the increased usage of multimedia web and social web services. This situation enforces the content providers to scale their infrastructure in order to cope with the extra provisioning of network traffic, storage and other resources. Since the complexity and cost factors in scaling the infrastructure exist, we propose a novel solution for providing and delivering contents to clients by introducing a brokered collaborative content delivery system. The architectural design of this system leverages content redundancy and content distribution mechanisms in other content providers to deliver contents to the clients. With the recent emergence of cloud computing, we show that this system can also be adopted to run on the cloud. In this paper, we focus on a brokering scheme to mediate user requests to the most appropriate content provider based on a ranking system. The architecture provides a novel Global Rank Value (GRV) concept in estimating content provider capability and transforming the QoS requirement of a content request. A fairness model that will bring this design to be attractive to the current content delivery regime is also introduced. Through simulation, we show that using fair provider selection, contents can be provisioned by a better pool of qualified providers thus leveraging the collaboration and preventing potential QoS violation that may occur when the size of pool is smaller.