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
