Abstract. With the help of distributed hash tables, the structured peerto-peer system has a short routing path and good extensibility. However, the mismatch between the overlay and physical network is the barrier to build an effective peer-to-peer system in the large-scale environment. In this paper, we propose a generic approach to solve this problem, which is quite different from other protocol-dependent methods. We reserve the structure of system and break the coupling between the node and its identifier by swap operations. We also propose several policies to reduce the traffic overhead. The policies include adaptive probing and shadow scheme. The experiment shows that our approach can greatly reduce the average latency of overlay networks and the overhead is controllable.