Agentic Design

Patterns
📡

Agent Communication Protocols(ACP)

Standardized communication mechanisms for agent interaction including message passing, publish-subscribe, and event-driven patterns

Complexity: mediumMulti-Agent

🎯 30-Second Overview

Pattern: Comprehensive communication protocols for agent interaction including REST APIs, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, SSE, and message queuing

Why: Enables flexible synchronous/asynchronous communication, real-time updates, efficient data transfer, and scalable multi-protocol coordination

Key Insight: Multi-protocol support + standardized interfaces + real-time capabilities = robust agent communication

⚡ Quick Implementation

1Choose Protocol Type:Select REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, SSE, or Message Queue based on needs
2Define Interface Schema:Design API contracts, message schemas, or event structures with versioning
3Setup Infrastructure:Deploy API gateways, message brokers, load balancers, and monitoring
4Implement Communication:Add protocol handlers, error handling, authentication, and rate limiting
5Monitor & Optimize:Track latency, throughput, error rates, and connection health
Example: REST API ↔ gRPC ↔ GraphQL ↔ WebSocket ↔ Message Queue → Multi-Protocol Agent Network

📋 Do's & Don'ts

✅Choose appropriate protocol: REST for CRUD, gRPC for performance, GraphQL for flexibility
✅Use WebSocket for real-time bidirectional communication and SSE for server-push updates
✅Implement proper API versioning, schema evolution, and backward compatibility
✅Add comprehensive error handling, timeouts, circuit breakers, and retry logic
✅Use Protocol Buffers for gRPC efficiency and OpenAPI specs for REST documentation
✅Implement authentication (OAuth2, JWT) and rate limiting across all protocols
❌Use only one protocol - different use cases require different communication patterns
❌Ignore connection management for WebSocket and proper cleanup for SSE streams
❌Skip load balancing and service discovery for distributed agent networks
❌Use REST for real-time communication or gRPC for simple CRUD operations
❌Allow unbounded GraphQL queries or missing depth limiting protections

🚦 When to Use

Use When

  • • Multi-protocol agent networks requiring flexible communication patterns
  • • Real-time collaboration with bidirectional WebSocket communication
  • • RESTful agent services with standard CRUD operations and HTTP semantics
  • • High-performance inter-agent calls using gRPC and Protocol Buffers
  • • Complex data querying needs with GraphQL flexible query capabilities
  • • Server-push notifications and live updates using SSE streams

Avoid When

  • • Simple single-protocol systems where complexity is unnecessary
  • • Environments with strict network restrictions blocking multiple ports
  • • Legacy systems unable to support modern protocol implementations
  • • Ultra-constrained devices with minimal processing capabilities
  • • Applications with extremely simple point-to-point communication needs

📊 Key Metrics

Message Throughput
Messages per second processed by the communication system
Delivery Latency
P50/P95 time from message send to agent processing
Delivery Success Rate
Percentage of messages successfully delivered and acknowledged
Queue Depth
Average and maximum message backlog per topic/queue
Processing Concurrency
Number of parallel message handlers per agent
Network Utilization
Bandwidth usage and connection efficiency across agents

💡 Top Use Cases

Enterprise Agent Ecosystem: Multi-protocol communication with REST APIs for management, gRPC for performance-critical calls, and WebSocket for real-time coordination
Real-Time Trading Platforms: WebSocket for live market data, REST for order management, GraphQL for complex portfolio queries, and message queues for settlement
Interactive AI Assistants: SSE for streaming responses, WebSocket for conversational flow, REST for session management, and GraphQL for context retrieval
Autonomous Vehicle Networks: gRPC for low-latency sensor data, MQTT for telemetry, REST for fleet management APIs, and WebSocket for real-time coordination
Multi-Agent Research Systems: GraphQL for flexible data queries, gRPC for compute-intensive tasks, REST for resource management, and SSE for progress streaming

References & Further Reading

Deepen your understanding with these curated resources

Recent Academic Research (2023-2025)

LLM Multi-Agent Communication: Protocols and Performance Analysis (Wang et al., 2025)

Event-Driven Architecture for AI Agent Coordination (Chen et al., 2024)

Scalable Message Passing in Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems (Liu et al., 2024)

Asynchronous Communication Patterns in Distributed AI Systems (2024)

Message Queuing & Event Streaming (2024-2025)

Apache Kafka for AI Agent Communication: Best Practices (2024)

RabbitMQ Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP 1.0) Guide (2024)

Apache Pulsar for Multi-Tenant Agent Systems (2024)

NATS.io: Cloud Native Messaging for Microservices (2024)

Synchronous Protocol Standards (2024-2025)

gRPC Protocol Documentation - High Performance RPC Framework (2024)

REST API Design Guidelines - OpenAPI 3.1 Specification (2024)

GraphQL Specification - Query Language and Runtime (2024)

Protocol Buffers Language Guide v3 - Efficient Serialization (2024)

Real-Time Communication Protocols

WebSocket Protocol RFC 6455 with Extensions (2024)

Server-Sent Events (SSE) - HTML5 Standard (2024)

MQTT 5.0 Specification for IoT Communication (2023)

WebRTC Data Channels for Peer-to-Peer Communication (2024)

Multi-Agent Frameworks & Implementation

Microsoft AutoGen v0.4: Agent Communication Patterns (2024)

LangGraph Multi-Agent Communication (2024)

CrewAI Inter-Agent Communication Framework (2024)

OpenAI Swarm: Lightweight Agent Orchestration (2024)

Cloud & Infrastructure Solutions (2024)

AWS EventBridge for Serverless Agent Communication (2024)

Azure Service Bus: Enterprise Messaging (2024)

Google Cloud Pub/Sub for Real-Time Agent Coordination (2024)

Kubernetes Event-Driven Architecture with KEDA (2024)

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