Decentralized bootstrapping in pervasive applications

Deploying world-scaie pervasive applications usually requires substantial investments in server infrastructure. A better option is to use P2P techniques, because it distributes the load from the servers to the peers. However, this creates a new problem. Users do not know each others upfront and we do not want to rely on a central server infrastructure and therefore a single point of failure. Thus, we must provide a bootstrapping protocol that allows users to discover at least one peer of the overlay network. In this paper we give a survey of possible bootstrapping protocols and propose one approach that satisfies all of our requirements.