Saul Urso

Patrizio Dazzi, Emanuele Carlini, Matteo Mordacchini et al.

Agentic systems deployed across the compute continuum need discovery mechanisms that remain effective across cloud, edge, and intermittently connected domains. In some emerging agentic architectures, decentralized discovery is already an active design direction, placing DHT-based lookup on the path toward agent directories. This paper studies the trade-offs among major structured-overlay families for agent discovery, comparing Chord, Pastry, and Kademlia as candidate indexing substrates within a shared control-plane framework. Using a benchmark subset centered on a 4096-node stationary comparison and a representative 4096-node churn benchmark, the paper characterizes how discovery reliability, startup behavior, and control-plane overhead vary across these overlays. The goal is to clarify the operating points they expose for agent discovery across edge-to-cloud environments.

Patrizio Dazzi, Emanuele Carlini, Matteo Mordacchini et al.

Large-scale agentic systems run on distributed infrastructures where many software agents share physical hosts and are discovered via peer-to-peer mechanisms. Discovery must handle node-level churn from failures and host departures and agent-level churn from demand-driven activation, deactivation, and state changes. Their interaction reshapes classic trade-offs between structured and unstructured overlays. We study decentralized agent discovery under this two-level churn, assuming nodes host multiple agents, overlays are structured or gossip-based, and agents switch between warm and cold states. Using Kademlia as a structured and Cyclon+Vicinity as a gossip baseline, we compare stable, node-churn-only, agent-cooling-only, and combined regimes to see when routing efficiency, resilience, and service readiness align or favor different designs. Structured overlays are more robust and efficient in stable and node-churn regimes, while gossip-based overlays remain competitive and can be faster when readiness dominates.