Decentralized and Autonomous Bootstrapping for IPv6-based Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks are the foundation of a significant number of today?s most popular Internet applications, such as distributed file sharing, streaming videos, or Internet telephony. The current IPv4 protocol, however, has significant drawbacks within the P2P context: Firstly, extensive use of Network Address Translation (NAT) mechanisms hinders direct connectivity between arbitrary peers. Secondly, this impedes also discovery of P2P members in order to initially join such a P2P network, commonly referred to as the bootstrapping problem. The first drawback is overcome by IPv6?s sufficiently large address space and the lacking need for using IPv6-NATs. An efficient solution for the second problem based on the innovative features of IPv6 is discussed in this paper.