In this paper, an efficient Fibonacci series based hierarchical protocol-HFTM (Hierarchical Fibonacci Tree Multicast) is proposed for application-layer multicast. It adopts the idea of layer and cluster to construct multicast group members into a hierarchical architecture. During the cluster formation, it considers the underlying network properties to reduce packet delivering on costly links. In each cluster, a Fibonacci multicast tree is constructed by recursively partitioning the member sequence into two halves with different length. Moreover, the size of cluster is taken into account in order to obtain a balanced architecture. The considering of underlying network properties and the construction of Fibonacci multicast tree improve the delay performance of the novel protocol. The simulation shows that HFTM is an efficient and scalable application-layer multicast protocol. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.