Methods and apparatus for virtual channel allocation within an electronic device. In one exemplary embodiment, the device is a consumer electronics device having multiple camera sensors uses a modified high-speed protocol (e.g., DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (MST) protocol) to process camera data via one or more virtual channels. Unlike traditional solutions which rely on an intelligent source device to manage a network of devices, the present disclosure describes in one aspect a network of nodes internal to a consumer electronic device that is managed by the sink node (i.e., a “smart sink”). Additionally, since the full suite of protocol (e.g., DisplayPort) capabilities are unnecessary for certain design scenarios, certain further disclosed simplifications improve performance for sink nodes having very modest capabilities.