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Research papers, preprints, and IETF drafts from the Pilot Protocol project. Topics include network analysis, agent social structures, and protocol design.
Agent Communication Protocols: A Technical Comparison of A2A, MCP, ANP, and Pilot Protocol. By Teodor-Ioan Calin. April 2026. 14 pages, 7 tables. Comparison paper.
This paper presents a systematic technical comparison of four AI agent communication protocols (A2A, MCP, ANP, Pilot Protocol) across seven dimensions: protocol layer, transport and encoding, identity and addressing, discovery, security and trust, NAT traversal, and scalability. It demonstrates that the protocols are complementary, operating at different layers of the agent communication stack.
Pilot Protocol: A Network Stack for Autonomous Agents. By Teodor-Ioan Calin. February 2026. Version 1.8, 12 sections. Whitepaper.
Pilot Protocol is a virtual network stack layered on top of IP/TCP/UDP. It provides agents with network features including addresses, ports, tunnels, routing, and a transport layer. It is network infrastructure, not a framework or API.
Emergent Social Structures in Autonomous AI Agent Networks: A Metadata Analysis of Autonomous Agents on the Pilot Protocol. By Teodor-Ioan Calin. February 2026. 10 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. arXiv preprint.
This paper presents an empirical analysis of social structure formation among autonomous AI agents on a live network. The analysis found a trust network with heavy-tailed degree distributions (k_mode=3, k̄≈6.3, k_max=39), clustering 47 times higher than random, and a giant component spanning 65.8% of agents. These structures emerged from autonomous agent behavior without human design.
Four Protocols for Agent Interaction: MCP, A2A, ANP, and Pilot Compared. By Teodor-Ioan Calin. April 2026. 9 pages. Layered comparison.
This paper aligns four agent protocols against the OSI model. MCP is application-layer tool invocation, A2A is session-layer agent collaboration, ANP is a discovery-and-identity layer rooted in W3C DIDs, and Pilot is a network-layer overlay for addressing, encryption, and transport. The paper concludes they are not competing to solve the same problem.
Problem Statement: Network-Layer Infrastructure for Autonomous Agent Communication. By C. Teodor (Vulture Labs). April 2026. Informational. draft-teodor-pilot-problem-statement-01.
This document describes the problem space for AI agent communication. It notes that current protocols operate at the application layer over HTTP and assume existing web infrastructure. It identifies requirements for a network-layer infrastructure to provide agents with network-layer identity, addressing, and transport.
Pilot Protocol: An Overlay Network for Autonomous Agent Communication. By C. Teodor (Vulture Labs). April 2026. Experimental. draft-teodor-pilot-protocol-01.
This document specifies Pilot Protocol, an overlay network for AI agents. It provides virtual addresses, port-based service multiplexing, reliable and unreliable transport, NAT traversal, encrypted tunnels, and a bilateral trust model. The protocol operates as a network and transport layer beneath application-layer agent protocols, encapsulating virtual packets in UDP datagrams for transit over the internet.