%0 Journal Article
%T Improving Streaming Capacity in Multi-Channel P2P VoD Systems via Intra-Channel and Cross-Channel Resource Allocation
%A Yifeng He
%A Ling Guan
%J International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/807520
%X Multi-channel Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems can be categorized into independent-channel P2P VoD systems and correlated-channel P2P VoD systems. Streaming capacity for a channel is defined as the maximal streaming rate that can be received by every user of the channel. In this paper, we study the streaming capacity problem in multi-channel P2P VoD systems. In an independent-channel P2P VoD system, there is no resource correlation among channels. Therefore, we can find the average streaming capacity for the independent-channel P2P VoD system by finding the streaming capacity for each individual channel, respectively. We propose a distributed algorithm to solve the streaming capacity problem for a single channel in an independent-channel P2P VoD system. The average streaming capacity for a correlated-channel P2P VoD system depends on both the intra-channel and cross-channel resource allocation. To better utilize the cross-channel resources, we first optimize the server upload allocation among channels to maximize the average streaming capacity and then propose cross-channel helpers to enable cross-channel sharing of peer upload bandwidths. We demonstrate in the simulations that the correlated-channel P2P VoD systems with both intra-channel and cross-channel resource allocation can obtain a higher average streaming capacity compared to the independent-channel P2P VoD systems with only intra-channel resource allocation. 1. Introduction Video-on-demand (VoD) services have been attracting a lot of users because it allows users to watch any video at any time. Traditional client/server architectures for VoD services cannot provide video streams to a large number of concurrent users. To offload the server upload burden, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been integrated into VoD applications by utilizing the uplink bandwidths of the peers [1¨C5]. Most of the P2P VoD systems offer many video channels. Users can choose any of the channels that they are interested in at any time. The P2P VoD systems with multiple channels are called multi-channel P2P VoD systems. Depending on the resource correlation, multi-channel P2P VoD systems can be categorized into independent-channel P2P VoD systems and correlated-channel P2P VoD systems. In an independent-channel P2P VoD system, the peers watch the same channel form an independent overlay and share the resources with each other exclusively within the overlay. In a correlated-channel P2P VoD system, overlay formed by the peers watching channel can be correlated with overlay formed by the peers watching
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijdmb/2012/807520/