A heuristic bootstrapping mechanism for Kademlia

Churn is one of the crucial problems which restrict the development and deployment of DHT networks. In terms of churn treatment, this paper studies the quick start-up bootstrapping mechanism for Kademlia and proposes a heuristic bootstrapping algorithm to overcome the defects of the original. By modifying the way how to populate the routing tables, the heuristic algorithm decreases the messages sent by the joining nodes. Theoretical analysis and simulations show that this algorithm can reduce the cost incurred by node joining and boost the system´s capability of recovering from churn.