A Generic, Self-Organizing, and Distributed Bootstrap Service for Peer-to-Peer Networks

In many scenarios, self-organization is the driving force for the use of a peer-to-peer (p2p) network. However, most current p2p networks are not truly self-organizing, as little attention has been paid on how new nodes join a p2p network, the so-called bootstrapping. Current p2p network protocols rely on prior-knowledge of nodes like a list of IP addresses of bootstrap servers or like a list of known peers of a p2p network. However, this kind of prior knowledge conflicts with the self-organization principle and the distributed character of p2p networks. In this paper, we present the design of a generic, self-organizing, and distributed bootstrap service which can be used to bootstrap p2p networks of arbitrary size, even very small, private p2p networks. This bootstrap service works in today's Internet and it can be easily integrated into existing p2p applications. We present an evaluation of the proposed bootstrapping service showing the efficiency of our approach.