In tree-based multicast systems, a relatively small number of interior nodes carry the load of forwarding multicast messages. This works well when the interior nodes are highly available, d d cated infrastructure routers but it poses a problem for application-level multicast in peer-to-peer systems. SplitStreamadV esses this problem by striping the content across a forest of interior-nodno# sjoint multicast trees that d stributes the forward ng load among all participating peers. For example, it is possible to construct efficient SplitStream forests in which each peer contributes only as much forwarding bandH d th as it receives. Furthermore, with appropriate content encod ngs, SplitStream is highly robust to failures because a nod e fai ure causes the oss of a single stripe on average. We present thed#' gnand implementation of SplitStream and show experimental results obtained on an Internet testbed and via large-scale network simulation. The results show that SplitStreamd istributes the forward ing load among all peers and can accommod'9 peers with different band0 d capacities while imposing low overhead for forest constructionand maintenance.