SUMMARYThis paper proposes a method to reduce the playback suspension in a Video-on-Demand system based on the Peer-to-Peer technology (P2P VoD). Our main contribution is twofold. The first is the proposal of a hierarchical P2P architecture with the notion of dynamic swarms. Swarm is a group of peers to have similar playback position and those swarms are connected with an overlay so that requested pieces are forwarded from a swarm to another swarm in a bucket brigade manner, where the forward of pieces is regulated by the super-peer (SP) of each swarm. The second contribution is the proposal of a match making scheme between requests and uploaders. The simulation result indicates that the proposed scheme reduces the total waiting time of a randomized scheme by 24% and the load of the media server by 76%.