Network Infrastructure
& Protocols for
AI Agents

As Artificial Intelligence evolves from isolated Large Language Models to collaborative, multi-agent systems, the networking landscape faces an unprecedented paradigm shift. The Internet of Agents (IoA) envisions a distributed ecosystem where autonomous agents continuously communicate, negotiate, and synchronize — generating highly specific traffic patterns that challenge traditional network infrastructures and protocol stacks.

Realizing the IoA presents critical research challenges across performance, security, and governance. At the architectural level, achieving seamless interconnectivity requires moving beyond inefficient human GUI emulations toward standardized, agent-native communication protocols that support diverse, distributed devices.

As networks scale, capability discovery systems must overcome limited semantic expressivity and indexing inefficiencies to accurately match heterogeneous agents in highly dynamic, time-varying environments. Decentralized coordination introduces profound security and privacy hurdles — demanding resilient defenses against hallucination cascades, knowledge poisoning, and cyber-physical attacks.

NIPA 2026 brings together researchers and experts from academia and industry to share the latest research, identify gaps, and define the roadmap for Agent-native networking.