On Fast Channel Switching With a Parallel Multiple Channels Streaming in P2P Systems

A long start-up delay of a channel in IP-Based TV systems can degrade viewers’ quality of experience significantly. By leveraging the peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, we present a novel architecture for Internet TV systems that can shorten the start-up delay caused by channel switching, called multiple channels streaming (MCS). The MCS is a stream comprised of multiple parallel channels selected from all channels that work within a single channel streaming. Although some overhead traffic is involved by the MCS from a conventional perspective, it can alleviate start-up delay for viewers in a P2P video system. For each peer, the most important problem is to dynamically determine how many and which channels should be selected into the MCS. We propose a proper solution to this problem and analyze how much delay time can be reduced by the limited increase in overhead traffic in P2P systems.