Strategies of Collaboration in Multi-Channel P2P VoD Streaming

As compared to live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming, modern P2P video-on-demand (VoD) systems have brought much larger volumes of videos and more interactive controls to the Internet users. Nevertheless, the larger number of available videos and the flexibility of allowing users to jump back and forth in a video, have led to much fewer numbers of concurrent peers watching at a similar pace, that reduces the chance for collaborative chunk supply among peers and thus significantly increases the server bandwidth cost. Towards the ultimate goal of maximizing peer resource utilization, in this paper, we design effective strategies for both cross-channel and intra-channel collaborations in multi- channel P2P VoD systems, such that individual peer´s resources, including download/upload bandwidths and the cache capacity, are effectively utilized to maximize the streaming qualities in all the channels. In particular, each peer actively and strategically determines the supply-and-demand imbalance in different channels, as well as that among different chunks within each video, makes use of its surplus download capacity to fetch chunks with the most need, and then serves those chunks using its idle upload bandwidth, all without impairing its own streaming quality. Our extensive trace-driven simulations show the effectiveness of our strategies in reducing the server cost while guaranteeing high streaming qualities in the entire system, even during extreme scenarios such as unexpected flash crowds.