It is a great challenge to guarantee the service quality and reliability in the large scale peer-to-peer(P2P) networks of video-on-demand systems. This paper proposes a new multilevel P2P architecture, which can avoid the disadvantages of the centralized P2P and the pure P2P architectures while efſciently combine their merits. Methods are provided to design and realize the main distributed nodes. A prototype video-on-demand(VOD) system has been built. The experiments on that prototype system

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... ſrm that the expected functions of the main nodes have been achieved, and the designing and realization methods under the new multi-level P2P architecture can guarantee the system's quality of service, improve the system's reliability and extend the system's bandwidth.