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Peer‐to‐peer (P2P) streaming quickly emerges as an important application over the internet. A lot of systems have been implemented to support peer‐to‐peer media streaming. However, some problems still exist. These problems include non‐guaranteed communication efficiency, limited upload capacity and dynamics of suppliers which are all related to the overlay topology design. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel overlay construction framework for peer‐to‐peer streaming.

To exploit the bandwidth resource of neighboring peers with low communication delay, application of the grouping method was proposed to construct a flexible two‐layered locality‐aware overlay network. In the proposed overlay, peers are clustered into locality groups according to the communication delays of peers. These locality groups are interconnected with each other to form the top layer of the overlay. In each locality group, peers form an overlay mesh for transmitting stream to other peers of the same group. These overlay meshes form the bottom layer of the overlay.

Through simulations, the performance was compared in terms of communication efficiency, source‐to‐end delivery efficiency and reliability of the delivery paths of the proposed solution currently. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve the construction of a scalable, efficient and stable peer‐to‐peer streaming environment.

The new contributions in this paper are a novel framework which includes the adaptability, maintenance and optimization schemes to adjust the size of overlay dynamically according to the dynamics of peers; and considering the importance of locality of peers in the system.