Agent-OSI: A Layered Protocol Stack Toward a Decentralized Internet of Agents
🤖 AI Summary
Existing intelligent agents struggle to achieve interoperability, trusted interaction, and on-demand settlement due to platform silos and proprietary interfaces. This work proposes Agent-OSI, a six-layer protocol stack that builds a decentralized agent network atop the internet, integrating secure communication, decentralized identity, verifiable execution, semantic interoperability, and on-chain escrow-based settlement. The architecture innovatively leverages the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code to trigger payment challenges, enabling an efficient model where negotiation and delivery occur off-chain while settlement is settled on-chain. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces on-chain session costs by approximately 51% compared to a standard Web3 baseline, with blockchain confirmation latency typically not constituting a performance bottleneck in generative tasks.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating the shift from an Internet of information to an Internet of Agents (IoA), where autonomous entities discover services, negotiate, execute tasks, and exchange value. Yet today's agents are still confined to platform silos and proprietary interfaces, lacking a common stack for interoperability, trust, and pay-per-use settlement. This article proposes \textit{Agent-OSI}, a six-layer reference stack for decentralized agent networking built on top of the existing Internet. Agent-OSI combines secure connectivity and A2A messaging, decentralized identity and authorization, settlement and metering, verifiable execution and provenance, and semantic interoperability for orchestration. In particular, we treat HTTP 402 (Payment Required) as an application-level payment challenge (analogous to HTTP 401 for authentication) that triggers escrow-based settlement and verifiable receipts (instantiated via a blockchain escrow in our prototype), rather than introducing a new network-layer protocol. We implement a prototype and evaluate cost and latency. Results show that keeping negotiation and delivery off-chain while preserving verifiable settlement reduces on-chain session costs by approximately 51\% compared with a standard Web3 baseline in our prototype setting, and that blockchain confirmation latency is often not the dominant factor for generative workloads.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Internet of Agents
interoperability
decentralized
agent communication
pay-per-use settlement
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Agent-OSI
Internet of Agents
HTTP 402
decentralized settlement
verifiable execution
🔎 Similar Papers
