Ephemeral State Assisted Discovery of Peer-to-peer Networks

In the past few years there has been an impressive number of proposals for application-specific overlays or peerto-peer networks. However the procedure to bootstrap peers in those networks has remained an under-researched topic, typically left as an implementation detail. In this paper, we first study the performance of history lists, a common decentralised bootstrap mechanism used in P2P applications. We then investigate how some lightweight network support, such as Ephemeral State, could help build a P2P application that would not depend on any centralised mechanism to discover other peers.