The paper reports the first empirical, phase‑decomposed benchmark of handshake overhead in three major AI agent communication protocols—MCP (2025 and 2026 versions), A2A, and ACP—using their official SDKs. It measures round‑trip counts, per‑phase latency, wire bytes, and token cost across cold‑start, warm‑repeat, capability‑mismatch, and degraded‑metadata scenarios, finding that round‑trip count dominates cost (e.g., MCP’s legacy handshake requires three round trips and 230 ms at 50 ms RTT, while A2A needs one round trip and 61 ms). The study also shows that handshake cost scales with the counterpart’s capability inventory, with a 200‑capability counterpart consuming 11 % of a 200k‑token context window, and documents protocol evolution that reduces MCP’s handshake from three to zero round trips on warm reconnects.
arXiv:2607. 08565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM scheduling is critical to serving, yet it remains unclear how well existing designs fit agentic serving--with LLM requests issued by agents instead of humans.
arXiv:2607. 00297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When LLM agents use evaluator feedback to adapt their behavior in closed loops, evaluator biases propagate through the agent's strategy distribution -- a phenomenon known as evaluator preference coupling.
arXiv:2608. 12371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stream-processing systems increasingly operate across heterogeneous mobile edge--cloud infrastructures, where workload volatility, resource contention, and stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements complicate decentralized scheduling.
arXiv:2607. 16200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent systems that couple large language models (LLMs) with external tools and APIs are inherently non-deterministic: LLM sampling variance, external API state, CDN infrastructure headers, and execution-environment noise collectively prevent any prior agent run from being faithfully re-executed.
The paper investigates how coordination among AI agents serving different users degrades performance compared to a single coordinating agent. Across five advanced models and 77 scenarios in four shared-resource environments—API key budgets, clinic calendars, personal assistant bookings, and merge queues—the study finds that multi‑agent teams consistently underperform, sometimes collapsing entirely, and that even with communication channels coordination overhead remains significant. The authors identify specific failure modes such as stalling, action overriding, and claim fabrication, and propose environment‑specific mitigations like team leads and procedural instructions, while releasing the MAMUBench benchmark for future research.
arXiv:2606. 30317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, defines a standardized interface for connecting large language models (LLMs) to external tools, data sources, and services.
arXiv:2608. 15127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic applications are shifting AI serving from isolated model inference to long-running workloads in which LLMs coordinate tools, environments, and persistent state.
arXiv:2602. 13255v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present DPBench, a benchmark for evaluating coordination in multi-agent systems built from large language models.
arXiv:2510. 17149v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large-scale multi-agent systems evolve, the communication protocol layer has become a critical yet under-evaluated factor shaping performance and reliability.
The paper investigates the performance impact of using a remote KV cache tier for long‑context language model serving. In a disaggregated deployment of GLM‑5.3 on 8xB300 nodes, enabling the remote tier initially increased the 16k‑token p99 latency from 3.96 s to 17.3 s, and synchronous loading caused severe queue instability. By sharding the KV store across context‑parallel ranks, partitioning the remote tier, adding asynchronous loading, and fixing client bugs, the authors reduced the p99 latency from 83.32 s to 0.67 s and increased prefill throughput by 14–34 %. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that careful sharding and asynchronous handling of remote KV caches can dramatically improve latency and throughput in large‑scale LLM serving systems."
arXiv:2606. 29073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model Context Protocol (MCP)-style ecosystems give language-model applications a practical connection layer for tools, resources, prompts, and transports.
arXiv:2608. 12123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-agent services repeatedly execute small deterministic transitions between model and tool calls: route an outcome, update state, and emit the next effect.