Peer-to-peer Autonomous Agent Communication Network.

Reliable and secure communication between heterogeneously resourced autonomous agents controlled by competing stakeholders in a decentralized environment is a challenge. Agents require a means to find each other and communicate without reliance on a centralized party and participation in the system must be permissionless. We present the Agent Communication Network (ACN), a peer-to-peer lookup system that provides a distributed overlay to the Internet and addresses this problem. The ACN enables agents to find each other and to communicate safely. It achieves this by leveraging a distributed hash table for agent lookup, maintained by participating peers and through the use of public-key cryptography. The paper discusses the properties of the system and its guarantees as well as its integration with a novel multi-agent system. Preliminary benchmark results demonstrate the feasibility of the system, its performance, and its scalability.