This paper looks at the processing of skyline queries on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. We propose Skyframe, a framework for efficient skyline query processing in P2P systems, which addresses the challenges of quick response time, low network communication cost and query load balancing among peers. Skyframe consists of two querying methods: one is optimized for network communication while the other focuses on query response time. These methods are different in the way in which the query search space is defined. In particular, the first method uses a high dominating point that has a large dominating region to prune the search space to achieve a low cost in network communication. On the other hand, the second method relaxes the search space in order to allow parallel query processing to speed up query response. Skyframe achieves query load balancing by both query load conscious data space splitting/merging during the join/departure of nodes and dynamic load migration. We further show how to apply Skyframe to both the P2P systems supporting multi-dimensional indexing and the P2P systems supporting single-dimensional indexing. Finally, we have conducted extensive experiments on both real and synthetic data sets over two existing P2P systems: CAN (Ratnasamy in A scalable content-addressable network. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM Conference, pp. 161–172, 2001) and BATON (Jagadish et al. in A balanced tree structure for peer-to-peer networks. In: Proceedings of VLDB Conference, pp. 661–672, 2005) to evaluate the effectiveness and scalability of Skyframe.