Multiagent Foundations for Distributed Systems: A Vision

Early works and retrospectives by the researchers who founded the network protocols underlying current distributed systems indicate they were aware of the importance of capturing application meaning but didn’t know how to handle it programmatically. Therefore, those researchers introduced simplifications in the protocols that violated their own principle of the end-to-end argument in systems design. The thesis of this vision paper is the following. First, the above-mentioned simplifications, especially the reliance on reliable, ordered communication protocols such as TCP have run their course. Modern applications demand flexibility that can only be achieved through modeling application meaning, and many applications (such as those based on the Internet of Things) cannot pay TCP’s overhead. Second, the multiagent systems community has developed alternative meaning-based approaches that can provide a new foundation for distributed computing at large.