



nmop                                                               Y. Fu
Internet-Draft                                                    Q. Sun
Intended status: Standards Track                                 X. Song
Expires: 29 July 2026                                             C. Xie
                                                           China Telecom
                                                         25 January 2026


            Agent Communication Framework for Network AIOps
             draft-fu-nmop-agent-communication-framework-00

Abstract

   As the development of large model and agent technology, it is a trend
   for multi-agent collaboration to solve complex problems.  This
   document proposes an Agent Communication Framework, a multi-agent
   communication and collaboration framework that facilitates the
   coordination of heterogeneous multi-agents and supports intelligent
   network operations and maintenance (AIOps).  Its architecture
   includes an AI gateway and an Agent Name Service, along with
   capabilities such as monitoring and tracking, as well as security
   protection.  Agent Communication Framework provides a comprehensive
   solution for multi-agent communication and collaboration, laying the
   foundation for future interactive, scalable, secure, and controllable
   multi-agent network intelligent operations and maintenance.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on 29 July 2026.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.




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   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
   license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
   Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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   extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as
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   provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.2.  Definition and Terminology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Agent Communication Framework and Components  . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  AI Gateway  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     2.2.  Agent Name Service  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
       2.2.1.  Agent Accessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
       2.2.2.  Agent Addressing  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       2.2.3.  Security Protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       2.2.4.  Capabilities Monitoring and Management  . . . . . . .   9
       2.2.5.  Cross-domain synchronization  . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   3.  Use Case  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   4.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   6.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13

1.  Introduction

   As the rapid development of AI technology, network operations and
   maintenance have evolved from efficiency improvement to automation,
   through the Data-Driven Digital age with the rise of AIOps
   (intelligent network operations and maintenance), now striding
   towards the Agentic AI stage.  In this new phase, the collaborative
   capabilities of intelligent agents will drive operations and
   maintenance toward a higher level of autonomy.  However, current
   multi-agent collaboration still lacks reliable mechanisms for agent
   addressing, communication, and orchestration scheduling.  It
   introduces several requirements as below:

   • Agent registering and discovering：With the rapid developments of
   multi-agent collaborative scenarios, traditional service discovery
   mechanisms face several challenges.  They are unable to adapt to the
   multi-heterogeneous and dynamically changing capability of agents.
   There is a lack of a unified capability of registration and discovery
   framework for the cross-domain and spans different subject agents,



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   result in low efficiency of task-driven precise collaboration.  There
   is an urgent need to build a global agent capability registration
   mechanism, dynamically maintain the real-time capability database of
   agents across the network, and generate optimal matching strategies
   based on task requirements.

   • Cross-domain interconnection: In some task-oriented collaboration
   scenarios, it may encounter interoperability challenges—both within
   intra-domain and inter-domain use cases.  In inter-domain scenario,
   agents belonging to different domains must discover, access, and
   securely interact with one another to enable effective collaboration.

   • Security Operations: To support large-scale deployment of
   intelligent agents, a comprehensive operation-level security
   framework is required that integrates management, access control,
   traceability, and authentication tailored for agent-centric
   environments., with security mechanisms and capabilities such as zero
   trust, communication encryption and decryption, and supervision
   embedded in the protocol.

1.1.  Requirements Language

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
   BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

1.2.  Definition and Terminology

   • ACF：Agent Communication Framework

   • ANS：Agent Name Service

   • AI Gateway：AI GW

2.  Agent Communication Framework and Components

   To address the requirements described above, we propose an Agent
   Communication Framework for intra-domain and inter-domain agent
   communications.  It consists of two components: AI Gateway and Agent
   Name Service (ANS).  It is the “Connection and control Hub” for agent
   communication.  The overview of the agent communication framework is
   shown in Figure 1.







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    +---------------------------+     +----------------------------+
    |                           |     |                            |
    |      Domain1:   ACF       |     |      Domain2:   ACF        |
    |                           |     |                            |
    |                           |     |                            |
    |  +--------------------+   |     |  +---------------------+   |
    |  |                    |   |     |  |                     |   |
    |  | Agent Name Service <---+-----+--> Agent Name Service  |   |
    |  |                    |   |     |  |                     |   |
    |  +---------^----------+   |     |  +--------^------------+   |
    |            |              |     |           |                |
    |            |              |     |           |                |
    |      +-----v-----+--<-----+-----+--->--+----v------+         |
    |      |           |        |     |      |           |         |
    |      |           |        |     |      |           |         |
    |  +---v---+   +---v---+    |     |  +---v---+   +---v-- +     |
    |  |       |   |       |    |     |  |       |   |       |     |
    |  | AI GW |   | AI GW |    |     |  | AI GW |   | AI GW |     |
    |  |       |   |       |    |     |  |       |   |       |     |
    |  +---^---+   +---^---+    |     |  +---^---+   +---^---+     |
    |      |           |        |     |      |           |         |
    |      |           |        |     |      |           |         |
    +------+-----------+--------+     +------+-----------+---------+
           |           |                     |           |
           |           |                     |           |
       +---v---+   +---v---+             +---v---+   +---v---+
       |       |   |       |             |       |   |       |
       | Agent |   | Agent |             | Agent |   | Agent |
       |       |   |       |             |       |   |       |
       +-------+   +-------+             +-------+   +-------+

   As described in Section 1, efficient interconnection among agents
   relies on clear identity information and capability-based discovery.
   Therefore, a unified identity identification and agent information
   management mechanism forms the foundation for the secure agent
   interconnection.  Agent Communication Framework issue unique identity
   IDs for each agent and establish an authentication framework to
   ensure the security of mutual visits.  They are capable of managing
   information for a massive number of agents, able to obtain agent
   information through multiple methods to ensure information
   comprehensiveness.  In Agent Communication Framework, a semantics-
   based dynamic agent addressing scheme is proposed to enhance the
   accuracy and flexibility of agent interconnection and collaboration,
   enabling interoperability across different domains.  In Intra-domain
   scenarios, the agent communication framework enables the discovery
   and management within the domain and presents a unified proxy
   externally.  Independent AI gateways realize the unified access and
   mutual discovery of agents within domains such as edge homes and the



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   Internet of Things.  In inter-domain scenarios, information
   synchronization mechanism needs to be done by designing as an agent
   information repository in Agent Name Service (ANS) between different
   domains, combining with the existing DNS mechanisms for cross-domain
   addressing and discovery of agents.

2.1.  AI Gateway

   An AI Gateway is a reliable, efficient, and secure interconnection
   hub for agents.  The main functions of AI Gateway include:

   *  Service Proxy: Service Proxy function acts as an intelligent
      network address translation (NAT) layer that seamlessly translates
      between internal and external network addresses, enabling secure
      communication between private services and external clients.  By
      masking the identities and IP addresses of internal agents or
      services, it effectively hides the internal network topology from
      external access, thereby enhancing security, reducing exposure to
      potential threats, and simplifying service exposure management.

   *  Traffic forwarding and optimization: The AI Gateway provides
      intelligent traffic forwarding and optimization capabilities,
      including Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to prioritize
      critical workloads, dynamic multi-channel selection for optimal
      path routing based on real-time network conditions, and packet
      compression to reduce bandwidth consumption and latency.
      Additionally, it leverages AI-driven analytics to adaptively
      manage traffic flows, ensure reliable delivery, and enhance
      overall network efficiency and user experience.

   *  Security protection: It provides comprehensive security protection
      by implementing end-to-end channel encryption to ensure data
      confidentiality and integrity during transmission, coupled with
      advanced traffic security detection and real-time threat
      mitigation mechanisms—such as anomaly detection, intrusion
      prevention, and malicious payload filtering—to safeguard against
      cyberattacks and unauthorized access.

   *  Monitoring and auditing: It provides comprehensive monitoring and
      auditing capabilities by continuously observing and logging all
      interaction behaviors between agents, including request sources,
      destinations, timestamps, data payloads (where permitted), and
      access patterns.

   In addition to the capabilities described above, the AI Gateway also
   supports the requirements of high concurrency, high reliability, as
   well as scalability.




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   *  The AI Gateway supports persistent, always online sessions for
      heterogeneous agents, enabling seamless dynamic
      participation—where agents can join or leave a session at any time
      without disrupting the workflow.  It ensures session continuity
      through intelligent checkpointing and resumption mechanisms,
      allowing tasks to resume exactly from the point of interruption in
      the event of network disconnections or agent failures, without
      requiring the entire task to be restarted.  This capability
      maintains task integrity, improves resource efficiency, and
      enhances reliability in complex, multi-agent collaborative
      scenarios.

   *  The AI Gateway is designed to deliver highly concurrent, secure,
      and ultra-low-latency asynchronous communication for multi-agent
      systems, supporting scalable workloads with millions of
      simultaneous connections.  It ensures robust security through end-
      to-end encryption and fine-grained access control, while
      optimizing message routing and processing to minimize
      latency—enabling efficient, real-time coordination among large-
      scale heterogeneous agents

   *  The AI Gateway is designed for high scalability, supporting both
      horizontal and vertical expansion to accommodate growing multi-
      agent workloads.  Horizontally, it enables elastic scaling of
      gateways to handle increased traffic and agent density by
      dynamically adding or removing nodes based on demand.  Vertically,
      it implements recursive addressing across hierarchical gateway
      layers, allowing seamless inter-layer communication and efficient
      routing in large-scale, nested, or federated agent architectures.
      Together, these capabilities ensure the system can scale flexibly
      and efficiently—both outward across distributed deployments and
      upward through logical abstraction layers—while maintaining
      performance, consistency, and manageability.

   *  The AI Gateway supports high-reliability requirements for fully
      autonomous, human-intervention-free interactions among agents.  It
      ensures continuously stable and fault-resilient network
      connectivity through redundant pathways, automatic failover
      mechanism—thereby preventing communication disruptions that could
      otherwise trigger cascading failures across the agent ecosystem.
      This reliability is critical to maintaining uninterrupted task
      execution and system-wide stability in mission-critical multi-
      agent environments.








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2.2.  Agent Name Service

   Agent Name Service provides access and semantic addressing function
   for multi-agents, and combines with the AI Gateway to provide
   security protection and monitoring capabilities.

2.2.1.  Agent Accessing

   *  Registration: The Agent Name Service (ANS) provides a secure and
      structured access mechanism for intelligent agents through an
      integrated registration and identity management mechanism.  It
      begins with the Registration Module, which receives registration
      requests from agents, validates their legitimacy (e.g., through
      credentials, tokens, or domain policies), and initiates the
      enrollment process.  The Security Module then handles
      cryptographic identity provisioning by accepting the agent’s
      Certificate Signing Request (CSR), verifying its authenticity, and
      issuing a signed certificate to establish trusted identity.
      Finally, the Registry securely stores each agent’s
      metadata—including its unique identifier, certificate,
      capabilities—enabling reliable discovery, authentication, and
      secure communication across the multi-agents.  This end-to-end
      workflow ensures that only authorized agents are admitted into the
      system, with verifiable identities and consistent governance.



























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   *  Update, Renewal and Revocation: The Agent Name Service (ANS)
      supports comprehensive lifecycle management for registered agents
      through secure and auditable update, renewal, and revocation
      operations.  For updates, agents may submit requests to modify
      their metadata—such as capabilities, protocols, or agent Card
      information.  The ANS server performs signature verification to
      authenticate the request and ensures backward compatibility; if
      the changes introduce incompatibilities, the agent must update its
      version number and do re-registration.  Upon successful
      validation, the ANS updates the corresponding versioned record in
      its registry.  For certificate renewal, agents initiate a renewal
      request before their current certificate expires.  The ANS
      validates the agent’s identity via cryptographic signature
      verification.  After confirmation, it issues a new signed
      certificate while updating the associated agent entry—ensuring
      uninterrupted, trusted operation without service disruption.  For
      revocation, agents or administrators can request certificate
      invalidation in cases of key expiration.  After verifying the
      authenticity of the revocation request through signature checks,
      the ANS permanently removes the agent’s certificate and associated
      metadata from the registry, immediately terminating its ability to
      access.  All operations are executed under strict cryptographic
      validation and audit logging, ensuring integrity, traceability,
      and continuous security across the agent lifecycle.

2.2.2.  Agent Addressing

   The Agent Name Service (ANS) provides a millisecond-level Semantic
   Addressing Query capability that enables agent discovery—allowing
   users or systems to express intent in plain language (e.g., “Poor
   mobile signal and unstable broadband at home”) and automatically
   resolving it to the most relevant agents (e.g., Home Broadband Agent
   and Wireless Network Optimization Agent).  Semantic-based addressing
   and discovery of agents requires the Agent Name Service (ANS) to
   possess comprehensive, detailed descriptive information for all
   agents.  This functionality is implemented through three coordinated
   components:

   • The Resolution Module receives semantic resolution requests from
   agents and leverages RAG techniques to interpret the query and match
   it to appropriate agent. • The Registry then retrieves the
   corresponding agent’s metadata—including its capabilities, protocol
   details, and certificate—based on the resolved semantic intent. •
   Finally, the Security Module cryptographically signs the retrieved
   agent information and certificate using the private key, ensuring
   authenticity and integrity before returning the signed response to
   the requester.




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2.2.3.  Security Protection

   The Agent Name Service (ANS) incorporates robust security and
   governance mechanisms to ensure safe and controlled agent
   interactions.  It enforces fine-grained permission control at the
   agent level through a structured workflow that includes registration
   requests, administrative approval, and explicit
   authorization—ensuring that only vetted agents gain access to
   specific capabilities or resources.

   To counter adversarial inputs, ANS integrates prompt injection
   prevention by inspecting all incoming instructions or queries for
   malicious patterns, obfuscated commands, or attempts to hijack agent
   behavior, thereby safeguarding the integrity of agent operations.

   Additionally, it implements tiered content security protection to
   prevent sensitive information leakage, applying data classification
   policies, context-aware filtering, and output sanitization based on
   sensitivity levels.

2.2.4.  Capabilities Monitoring and Management

   The Agent Name Service (ANS) enables real-time monitoring of agent
   reference, dynamically constructs a graph of agent relationships to
   visualize interaction patterns and dependencies across the domain,
   and supports proactive intervention in anomalous or unauthorized
   behaviors.

   The Agent Name Service (ANS) provides intelligent agent capability
   management by systematically evaluating and verifying the functional
   competencies, performance characteristics, and operational boundaries
   of registered agents.  This includes assessing declared capabilities,
   validating actual behavior through runtime evidence or sandboxed
   testing, and maintaining a trusted, up-to-date profile of each
   agent’s verified skills.  By ensuring that advertised capabilities
   accurately reflect real-world functionality, ANS enables reliable
   agent discovery, safe composition, and context-aware orchestration
   within dynamic multi-agent domains.

2.2.5.  Cross-domain synchronization

   The Agent Name Service (ANS) enables cross-domain collaboration among
   intelligent agents by securely synchronizing agent information.  In
   inter-domain scenarios, information synchronization mechanism needs
   to be done by designing as an agent information repository in ANS
   between different domains, and combining with the existing DNS
   mechanisms for cross-domain addressing and discovery of agents.




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3.  Use Case

   *  Case 1: Home Broadband Service Installation

   In the scenario of handling home broadband service installation, we
   employ a collaborative system comprising 13 agents, including the
   Intent Recognition Agent, Domain-Specific Configuration Agent, Master
   Control Agent, Service Validation Agent etc.

   Phase 1: Service intent recognition

   Agent Used: Intent Recognition Agent; Master Control Agent of service
   installation

   Action: 1.Identify users' service installation requirements by the
   Intention Recognition Agent.  2.Automatically send the structured
   service intent to the Master Control Agent.

   Phase 2: Service Orchestration and Resource Allocation

   Agent Used: Master Control Agent of service installation; Service
   Orchestration and Resource Allocation Agent

   Action: 1.The Master Control Agent sends the service installation
   request to the Service Orchestration and Resource Allocation Agent,
   completes the planning of the service path and the evaluation and
   allocation of resources.  2.The Service Orchestration and Resource
   Allocation Agent feedback the service path and resource allocation
   plan back to the Master Control Agent.

   Phase 3: Data Preparation and Distribution

   Agent Used: Master Control Agent of service installation; Domain-
   Specific Configuration Agent

   Action: 1.The Service installation Master Control Agent initiates
   data preparation and configuration requests based on the plan.  2.The
   Domain-Specific Configuration Agent generates the systems
   corresponding configuration data and completes the automatic
   configuration of network elements (NEs) / network management systems.
   3.As the completion of the configuration, the results are
   automatically back to the Master Control Agent.

   Phase 4: Service Validation

   Agent Used: Master Control Agent of service installation; Domain-
   Specific Configuration Agent; Service Validation Agent




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   Action: 1.The Master Control Agent triggers the automated service
   validation process.  2.The Service Validation Agent collaborates with
   the Domain-Specific Configuration Agent to query the data of
   configuration and status, and subsequently performs installation
   verification and validation.  3.The validation results are back to
   the Master Control Agent, forming a closed-loop validation cycle.

   Phase 5: Quality monitoring

   Agent Used: Installation and Maintenance Scheduling Agent

   Action: 1.The Installation and Maintenance Scheduling Agent performs
   continuous monitoring of customer services to ensure the quality of
   new installations.

   Phase 6: Customer feedback survey

   Agent Used: Personal Intelligent Assistant Agent

   Action: 1.The Personal Intelligent Assistant Agent schedules the
   installation/maintenance engineers for service follow-up and review.

   *  Case 2: Home Broadband Network Fault Diagnosis

   In the scenario of handling home broadband network fault diagnosis,
   we employ a collaborative system comprising 13 agents, including the
   Intent Recognition Agent, Preprocessing Agent, Single-Domain Root
   Cause Analysis Agent, Knowledge Q&A Agent, Fault Handling Agent etc.

   Phase 1: User Complaint Intent Recognition and Data Sensing

   Agent Used: Intent Recognition Agent; Preprocessing Agent

   Action: 1.Identify the type of user complaint by the Intention
   Recognition Agent.  2.Automatically trigger the data preprocessing
   function of the Preprocessing Agent based on the complaint type to
   collect key information such as user devices, alarms, and networks
   information.  3.Complete unified perception and aggregation of user-
   side data.

   Phase 2: Home Broadband Fault Complaint Handling

   Agent Used: MSingle-Domain Root Cause Analysis Agent; Perception Data
   Collection Agent; Knowledge Q&A Agent; Data Collection Agent

   Action: 1.The Single-Domain Root Cause Analysis Agent performs
   initial root cause analysis based on existing data.
   2.If information is insufficient, it triggers the data recollection



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   mechanism of the Perception Data Collection Agent.  The Knowledge Q&A
   Agent guides the user to supplement key information.  The Data
   Collection Agent complements the missing data.  3. After multiple
   iterations, it outputs a most likely root cause, impact scope, and
   recommendations.

   Phase 3: Trouble Shooting

   Agent Used: Fault Handling Agent; Installation and Maintenance
   Scheduling Agent

   Action: 1.The Fault Handling Agent supports automatic fault recovery.
   2.If automatic repair fails, it triggers the Installation and
   Maintenance Scheduling Agent to generate the optimal dispatch plan
   based on the location and skills of the installation and maintenance
   engineers, as well as the urgency of the fault.

   Phase 4: Service Validation

   Agent Used: End-to-End Testing Agent

   Action: 1.The End-to-End Testing Agent initiates tests to ensure
   service consistency.

   Phase 5: Quality monitoring

   Agent Used: Installation and Maintenance Scheduling Agent

   Action: 1.The Installation and Maintenance Scheduling Agent performs
   continuous monitoring of customer services to to prevent recurring
   faults.

   Phase 6: Customer feedback survey

   Agent Used: Personal Intelligent Assistant Agent

   Action: 1.The Personal Intelligent Assistant Agent schedules the
   installation/maintenance engineers for service follow-up and review.

4.  Security Considerations

   TBD

5.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no IANA actions.

6.  Normative References



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   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

Acknowledgements

   TBD

Authors' Addresses

   Yu Fu
   China Telecom
   Beijing
   China
   Email: fuy44@chinatelecom.cn


   Qing Sun
   China Telecom
   Beijing
   China
   Email: sunqiong@chinatelecom.cn


   Xin Song
   China Telecom
   Beijing
   China
   Email: songx18@chinatelecom.cn


   Chongfeng Xie
   China Telecom
   Beijing
   China
   Email: xiechf@chinatelecom.cn










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