Agent transfer protocol enables reliable cross organization communication
Agent Transfer Protocol: Server-Mediated Agent-to-Agent Communication Architecture for the Agentic Web
Artificial IntelligenceMultiagent Systems
Summary
Many software agents need to work together across different organizations, but they face problems like dropped messages or offline periods. The authors propose a system called Agent Transfer Protocol (ATP) that uses domain servers to manage message delivery and verification even when agents are offline or replaced. This helps maintain secure, continuous communication by having each domain store and verify messages independently. The authors tested a prototype with language model agents and showed it can handle offline delays and verify message authenticity.
What this means in practice
- •For enterprise software developers: Create systems that maintain secure, continuous communication between agents operating in different organizations even when some agents go offline.
- •For cloud service engineers: Build cross-domain messaging services that guarantee message source verification and delivery persistence through server mediation.
Authors
Yuqi Qiu, Zuyao Xu, Lu Sun, Xiang Li, Fasheng Miao, Fubin Wu, Haixin Duan, Zheli Liu
Abstract
The Agentic Web needs to support continuous collaboration among agents from different organizations. These collaborative relationships may span multiple tasks, network connections and execution instances. Such interactions require stable communication entries, message reception when instances are offline, and source verification after delayed reading. How to organize these responsibilities so that cross domain communication does not depend on specific execution instances being continuously online is a key issue for building long term agent interaction infrastructure. We propose ATP (Agent Transfer Protocol), a cross organization agent communication protocol adopting a domain mediated architecture. In this architecture, administrative domains maintain stable addresses and receiving entries for logical agents. The domain servers of both parties continuously undertake cross domain transmission. The receiving domain verifies and saves messages for execution instances to read later. The sending domain signs the complete message envelope. This allows the receiving instance to independently reverify the domain source and content integrity after the original connection ends, provided the original verification public key is still trusted and obtainable. We implemented an ATP prototype and evaluated it through a controlled cross organization LLM agent workflow, mechanism checks and latency measurements. The workflow completed subsequent business processing after instances went offline or were replaced. The independent verifier successfully verified the domain source and content integrity of saved messages. Latency measurements further quantified the communication and processing overhead introduced by the continuous mediation of domain servers.