One more server for supporting random seeking in a P2P video-on-demand system

In a P2P video-on-demand (VoD) system, the asynchronous characteristic of users' random seeking makes data sharing among peers more challenging, and raises very high capability requirement of the source video server. In this paper, we propose adding one more server in a P2P VoD system to support the random seeking operations and investigate the capacity dimensioning problem for the new server. We use a simple queuing model to characterize the access of users' random seeking data requests to the server and formulate a quantitative relationship between request arrival rate of random seeking and the required bandwidth of the server under longest tolerant waiting time constraint. The numerical results show that only fairly small server capacity is needed to satisfy the bandwidth requirement of random seeking in a P2P VoD system with thousands of users.