An MQTT Architecture for Scalable Agentic AI Collaboration
The enterprise is on the cusp of a new era of automation, powered by a rapidly growing ecosystem of specialized AI agents. From sales forecasting agents in Customer Relationship Management (CRMs) to supply chain optimizers in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) and engineering co-pilots in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems.
These intelligent actors promise to revolutionize business processes. However, this transformative potential is constrained by a fundamental challenge: how do we make these disparate agents communicate, coordinate, and collaborate effectively at an enterprise scale?
Initial attempts to solve this, like Linux Foundation’s A2A protocol (formerly Google’s Agent-to-Agent protocol), have provided a valuable foundation for semantic interoperability, standardizing how agents describe their capabilities and format messages. Yet, they are built on an architectural paradigm, direct, point-to-point communication using HTTP and gRPC, that is fundamentally mismatched with the demands of a complex, distributed enterprise. This request-response model creates brittle, tightly-coupled systems where the number of connections explodes quadratically, operational complexity becomes unmanageable, and a single agent failure can trigger cascading disruptions.
This whitepaper argues that the path to scalable, resilient, and truly autonomous agent collaboration lies in a paradigm shift: from direct, request-response interactions to a decoupled, event-driven architecture. By replacing point-to-point connections with a central message broker, agents can communicate asynchronously by publishing events and subscribing to topics of interest. This approach eliminates architectural rigidity, enables dynamic workflows, and ensures reliable communication across complex and unreliable networks.
We will demonstrate that the MQTT protocol, with its lightweight design, robust publish-subscribe capabilities, and proven scalability in mission-critical IoT deployments, is the ideal communication fabric to act as the central nervous system for this new generation of enterprise AI. This paper will deconstruct the limitations of HTTP-based protocols, detail the benefits of an event-driven model, and provide a concrete example for layering A2A semantics over MQTT. The result is a blueprint for building a truly interoperable AI agent ecosystem that is not only intelligent but also scalable, flexible, and resilient enough for the modern enterprise.
Chapters of the Whitepaper
A2A for Enterprise-Scale AI Agent Communication: Architectural Needs and Limitations
The Benefits of Event-Driven Architecture for AI Agent Communication
Why MQTT is Best Suited for AI Agent Communication
Example of AI Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Communication Over MQTT
