  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.
