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Agent Communication Protocols
Standardized communication mechanisms for agent interaction including message passing, publish-subscribe, and event-driven patterns
In 30 seconds
- What
- Agents exchange work through message queues, topics, or events rather than direct calls, enabling asynchronous decoupling and selective routing.
- When to use
- Multiple agents must coordinate without blocking, or when some agents need to react to events published by others independently.
- Watch out
- Message ordering and delivery guarantees become critical; lost or delayed messages can silently break downstream workflows without obvious failure signals.
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Agent Communication Protocols: Overview
Standardized communication mechanisms for agent interaction including message passing, publish-subscribe, and event-driven patterns
- Asynchronous messaging
- Topic-based routing
- Message queuing
- Event broadcasting
- Delivery guarantees
- Subscriber management
- Message filtering
- Scalable distribution
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References
The papers, specifications, and repositories this pattern is based on.
- Asynchronous Communication Patterns in Distributed AI Systems (2024)
- 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)
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