Organizers

Beichuan Zhang (University of Arizona, USA)

Dirk Kutscher (HKUST (GZ), China)

Lan Wang (University of Memphis, USA)

Lixia Zhang (UCLA, USA)

Technical Program Committee

Alessandro Cornacchia (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)

Alex Afanasyev (A2 Consulting)

Andreas Terzis (Anthropic, USA)

Beichuan Zhang (University of Arizona, USA)

Dirk Kutscher (HKUST (GZ), China)

Hong Xu (CUHK, Hong Kong)

Jiadong Yu (HKUST (GZ), China)

Jörg Ott (Technical University of Munich, Germany)

K. K. Ramakrishnan (UC Riverside, USA)

Lan Wang (University of Memphis, USA)

Lixia Zhang (UCLA, USA)

Luca Muscariello (Cisco)

Mingxing Zhang (Tsinghua University, China)

Tianyuan Yu (UCLA, USA)

Xiaohui Xie (Tsinghua University, China)

Xiaoming Fu (University of Göttingen, Germany)

Ying Zhang (Meta)

Yong Cui (Tsinghua University, China)

Call for Papers

The emergence of AI agents introduces new requirements for networked systems. Agents are increasingly expected to discover services and other agents, delegate tasks, coordinate actions, exchange state, reason over provenance, and operate across administrative and trust boundaries. These interaction patterns go beyond traditional host-centric request-response communication and raise fundamental questions for network protocol design.

Current Internet architectures provide strong foundations for packet delivery, naming, transport, and secure communication channels, but they do not directly provide abstractions for agent identity, capability-based discovery, intent-driven communication, trust delegation, provenance-aware exchange, or accountable multi-agent coordination. As a result, many emerging agent systems rely on application-specific integration frameworks, centralized platforms, or ad hoc protocol conventions.

AgentNet 2026 invites original research, position papers, and early-stage work on the networking foundations of autonomous agent ecosystems. A central question for the workshop is whether large-scale agent ecosystems require a new architectural thin waist: a minimal interoperability substrate that allows heterogeneous agents, tools, models, platforms, and administrative domains to communicate and coordinate without requiring global agreement on application frameworks, reasoning engines, or trust authorities.

The workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners from network protocols, distributed systems, security, AI systems, information-centric networking, Web architecture, and federated systems to identify the key protocol abstractions, architectural principles, and deployment models for agent networking.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas.

Submission Types

• Full research papers: original research results, systems, protocols, measurements, or evaluations.
• Short papers: early-stage ideas, preliminary results, or focused technical contributions.
• Position papers: architectural viewpoints, research agendas, open problems, or critical perspectives.
• Experience papers: practical systems, implementation experience, operational lessons, or case studies.

Paper Format and Review

Submitted papers must be original and unpublished work and should follow the standard ICNP formatting guidelines.

Full papers may be up to 6 pages, excluding references. Short, position, and experience papers may be up to 4 pages, excluding references.

All submissions will be reviewed by the technical program committee. Reviews will consider technical quality, originality, relevance to the workshop scope, clarity of presentation, and potential to stimulate discussion.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for and present the work at the workshop.

Important Dates

Submission-related deadlines are listed in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time.