Bootstrapping chord in ad hoc networks not going anywhere for a while

With the growing prevalence of wireless devices, infrastructure-less ad hoc networking is coming closer to reality. Research in this field has mainly been concerned with routing. However, to justify the relevance of ad hoc networks, there have to be applications. Distributed applications require basic services such as naming. In an ad hoc network, these services have to be provided in a decentralized way. We believe that structured peer-to-peer overlays are a good basis for their design. Prior work has been focused on the long-run performance of virtual peer-to-peer overlays over ad hoc networks. In this paper, we consider a vital functionality of any peer-to-peer network: bootstrapping. We formally show that the self-configuration process of a spontaneously deployed chord network has a time complexity linear in the network size. In addition to that, its centralized bootstrapping procedure causes an unfavorable traffic load imbalance