This paper presents a novel end host multicast protocol (DSM) on top of the mesh overlays for P2P networks. Unlike the previous schemes, the major feature of DSM is that it does not need a multicast tree for routing the multicast messages. DSM can implement the scalable and efficient multicast communications in a fully distributed way and consists of the following algorithms: 1. cluster formation that forms the group into clusters and each cluster consists of a small number of members; 2. cluster core selection that selects a core for each cluster who has the minimum sum of overlay hops to all other cluster members; 3. multicast routing that includes the balanced RA routing approach which enables a cluster core to construct the connections with other cores dynamically by using the rectangle area and the balanced forward flooding scheme in each cluster which evenly distributes the data traffic and link stress among the links in the multicast system. Simulation results show that DSM is fully distributed, scalable and efficient as compared with some well-known end host multicast systems. © 2005 IEEE.