arXiv Machine Learning By Pranav Varshney

The Cost of Saying Hello: An Empirical Study of Handshake Overhead in AI Agent Communication Protocols

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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.

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