Internet-Draft Task-discovery March 2026
Moussa, et al. Expires 2 September 2026 [Page]
Workgroup:
Network Working Group
Internet-Draft:
draft-mapmw-task-discovery-00
Published:
Intended Status:
Informational
Expires:
Authors:
H. Moussa
Huawei Canada
A. Akhavain
Huawei Canada
R. Pioli
Independent
J. Mozley
Infoblox, Inc.
N. Williams
Infoblox, Inc.

Task discovery in agentic networks

Abstract

This document defines an architectural framework for an open, interoperable ecosystem in which task owners publish tasks—represented as structured task cards—to a task‑posting platform, enabling autonomous agents to discover tasks, negotiate execution terms, and coordinate multi‑agent collaboration. The architecture introduces a set of functional layers—including the Task Owner Layer, Task Owner Access Layer, Task‑Posting Platform, Agentic Layer, Agent Access Layer, and an optional Communication Link—that collectively support secure task publication, agent discovery, capability evaluation, and bilateral negotiation. The framework is designed to accommodate heterogeneous agents with diverse skill sets, trust requirements, and operational models, while ensuring consistent interaction patterns across platforms and vendors.

The document also surveys existing agent‑discovery approaches, such as A2A, agntcy/OASF, ARDP, and DNS‑AID, and identifies gaps that motivate a unified, interoperable model for task‑centric and agent‑initiated discovery and interaction. It also explores possible ways by which the current approached can enhance the proposed framework. The goal of this architecture is not to replace existing mechanisms but to provide a complementary framework that enables agent–task interactions in scenarios that are difficult to support using traditional agent‑to‑agent or platform‑centric interaction models. The document is concluded with some potential standardization venues for the IETF.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on 2 September 2026.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

To date, both industry and academic communities have shown strong interest in the problem of agent discovery, in which a task owner seeks to identify the most suitable agent or group of agents to perform a given task. Several frameworks have been proposed such as A2A, Agntcy, BANDAID, ARDP, and DNA which we will examine in detail in later sections.

It is important to note that, although these methods offer valuable insights and each has distinct strengths and limitations, they share a common design principle that creates several challenges. They all assume agents are represented by identification records stored in a registry and made discoverable to task owners, who must then sift through piles of agent IDs to find suitable providers and assign tasks. This reliance on ID‑card–based discovery introduces several limitations within the broader framework, including:

2. Task Discovery: an Agent initiated engagement

Given the above foreseeable potential challenges to traditional approaches, we propose an alternative and complimentary framework where agents take active role in task to agent matching. In this framework, we consider what we refer to as task discovery, as follows:

The above proposed complimentary architecture can help facilitate various services, including:

It should be clear from the above that the primary advantage of the proposed architecture is to shift part of the discovery burden from task owners to service‑providing agents rather than to replace existing registry‑based discovery. Task owners retain the option to search agent registries, but the complementary billboard model lets owners post raw, unsplit tasks and lets agents perform decomposition, diagnostics, and coalition formation. Agents still rely on discovery to assemble teams, but their team formation is driven by objectives inferred from the task posting and by agents’ own knowledge of capabilities and trust relationships. To make this shift practical and secure, the platform should combine owner‑configurable trust policies with policy profiles, machine‑readable credentials, standardized task posting mechanisms, standardized task metadata formatting, billboard admission controls, and budgeted search/stop rules so owner flexibility does not produce fragmentation, spoofing, or unscalable manual vetting. All of these aspects can benefit from discussions and developments within the IETF as will be discussed later.

3. Traditional agent-task discovery approaches

This section aims at providing a brief high level collective description of traditional known agent discovery mechanisms (i.e., some form of a summary for the different approaches that outlines the general theme)

3.1. Approach 1 Agent-to-Agent protocol (A2A)

3.1.1. General description of the approach

A2A uses Agent Cards (structured JSON metadata) plus registry servers and discovery clients so that agents and clients can retrieve machine‑readable descriptions of remote agents’ capabilities and endpoints. Discovery is tightly coupled with the A2A messaging and lifecycle model.

3.1.2. Components, interfaces, and protocols

  • Agent Card: the primary discovery artifact (JSON schema) describing name, capabilities, endpoints, and interaction hints.

  • AgentRegistry / DiscoveryClient: servers that host Agent Cards and clients that query registries or use local discovery strategies.

  • A2A transport and security stack: discovery is integrated with the protocol’s authentication and session establishment flows so that discovery leads directly into authenticated communication.

3.1.3. Known implementations / ecosystem

Google published A2A and maintains a public GitHub repository and documentation; multiple SDKs and language bindings (including a Python discovery module) implement the Agent Card and registry patterns.

3.1.4. Shortcomings and limitations (expected or reported)

  • Registry and card freshness: Agent Cards must be kept up to date; stale cards can misrepresent runtime capabilities.

  • Owner specification burden: discovery via structured cards assumes owners or publishers can accurately enumerate capabilities; vague tasks still require additional negotiation or diagnostics.

  • Interoperability gaps without profiles: different deployments may extend Agent Cards or discovery strategies; without standardized profiles, cross‑domain behavior can vary.

3.2. Approach 2 Agntcy by Cisco

3.2.1. General description of the approach

AGNTCY provides a registry‑and‑messaging stack for agent interoperability: agents publish metadata and capability records to discoverable services, use secure messaging for interaction, and rely on observability/attestation components to verify behavior. Discovery within Agntcy centers on a registry‑style directory that indexes agent metadata and capability schemas; agents publish machine‑readable schema‑backed records (built on the Open Agentic Schema Framework (OASF)) and discovery queries retrieve matching entries.

3.2.2. Components, interfaces, and protocols

  • OASF schema server and schema repository for capability and metadata definitions.

  • Agent Directory / Agent Directory Service (ADS) that indexes signed agent records and maps capability descriptors to content locations.

  • Secure low‑latency messaging (SLIM) and transport bindings for agent‑to‑agent communication that integrate discovery with secure agent‑to‑agent messaging and observability pipelines.

  • Identity, observability, and evaluation subsystems for provenance, runtime telemetry, and capability assessment.

3.2.3. Known implementations / ecosystem

AGNTCY code and reference components are available on GitHub from Outshift/Cisco and collaborators; the project has been adopted into a Linux Foundation initiative with multiple industry participants.

3.2.4. Shortcomings and limitations (expected or reported)

  • Registry‑centric bias: relies on owners or agents to keep registry entries current; static entries can become stale relative to runtime capability.

  • Operational complexity: full stack (registry, messaging, observability) increases deployment and integration effort for platforms.

  • Cold‑start for newcomers: while registries provide authoritative identity, newcomers still need paths to earn visibility and reputation unless additional onboarding flows are defined.

3.3. Approach 3 DNS for AI Discovery (DNS-AID)

  • describe the approach

  • Highlight different components, interfaces, protocols....etc

  • name some well-known implementations

  • list known or expected shortcomings of the approach if any

3.4. Approach 4: Agent Registration and Discovery Protocol (ARDP)

3.4.1. General Description of the Approach

The Agent Registration and Discovery Protocol (ARDP) is a control-plane protocol designed to provide stable agent identifiers, authenticated registration, and authorized endpoint resolution in distributed and federated environments.

ARDP is not limited to static agent “card” storage. It defines a dynamic, soft-state registration model in which bindings expire and must be refreshed, and in which resolution is subject to authorization policy and privacy controls. This distinguishes ARDP from passive directory models and enables its use in mobile, federated, and multi-tenant environments.

Unlike static registries that merely store agent identification records, ARDP defines:

  • Identity-bound registration with cryptographic proof-of-control (JWS-based PoC for REGISTER/refresh operations).

  • Soft-state bindings with TTL and refresh semantics, allowing dynamic endpoint mobility.

  • Fine-grained authorization for RESOLVE and QUERY operations.

  • Capability advertisement independent of interaction protocol (e.g., MCP, A2A, HTTP, gRPC).

  • Explicit federation model with provenance metadata and TTL honoring.

  • Privacy-aware redaction defaults for discovery responses.

3.4.2. Core Characteristics

ARDP operates as a minimal control-plane discovery layer. It does not define session management, task execution semantics, runtime authorization tokens, billing mechanisms, or governance frameworks. Instead, it focuses on:

  • Binding a stable Agent Identifier (AID) to active endpoints and capability metadata.

  • Ensuring that only entities that can prove control of an AID may register or refresh it.

  • Providing authorized resolution of endpoints and capabilities.

4. Our approach: task cards and task discovery

This section aims to provided general high-level description and architecture of the proposed Task Discovery Ecosystem. It also poses some questions that need answers and opens up venues for discussions.

4.1. Task Discovery Ecosystem

+----------+                                                         +----------+
|          |                                                         |          |
|+--------+|      +--------+                         +--------+      |+--------+|
|| T.O. 1 || <--> |        |                         |        | <--> || Agent 1||
|+--------+|      |        |      +-----------+      |        |      |+--------+|
|          |      |        |      |           |      |        |      |     ↕    |
|+--------+|      |  T.O.  |      |   Task    |      | Agent  |      |+--------+|
|| T.O. 2 || <--> | Access | <--> |  Posting  | <--> | Access | <--> || Agent 2||
|+--------+|      | Layer  |      |  Platform |      | Layer  |      |+--------+|
|          |      |        |      |           |      |        |      |     ↕    |
|+--------+|      |        |      +-----------+      |        |      |+--------+|
|| T.O. n || <--> |        |                         |        | <--> || Agent m||
|+--------+|      +--------+                         +--------+      |+--------+|
|          |                                                         |          |
+----------+                                                         +----------+
     ↑                                                                    ↑
     |                         Communication  link                        |
     +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
* T.O: Task Owner
Figure 1: Figure 1: Task Discovery Ecosystem

As shown in the figure, the ecosystem consists of different layers.

  • Task Owner Layer: This layer hosts the entities that submit tasks requiring assistance from AI agents. It provides mechanisms for verifying, authenticating, and registering trusted task owners, ensuring that only authorized parties can participate in the system. This layer also manages the lifecycle of owner activity—including task submission, accounting and charging, and policy enforcement—and offers the privacy and security controls needed to protect owner data and identity.

  • Agentic Layer: The Agentic Layer hosts the autonomous agents that evaluate, select, and execute tasks. Agents in this layer expose diverse skill sets and operate as independent decision‑making entities. They are expected to discover posted tasks through standardized search interfaces, analyze task requirements, compare them against their own capabilities, and determine whether they are suitable candidates. Once engaged, agents can communicate with task owners to request assignment, seek clarification, provide progress updates, or deliver results. This layer may also support additional functions such as capability attestation, agent registration and authentication, reputation tracking, coalition formation for multi‑agent tasks, and mechanisms for agents to manage their own operational state (availability, load, or cost). Within this layer, agent‑to‑agent discovery, communication, and session‑management protocols—such as A2A, agntcy, ARDP, and DNS‑AID—may be used to support coalition formation, peer coordination, and agent‑level discovery needed to assemble appropriate teams for tasks that require multi‑agent collaboration. In some implementations, specialized “scouting agents” may continuously search for suitable tasks and, upon discovery, rely on agent‑to‑agent protocols to subcontract or delegate the task to the most appropriate agents within their network.

  • Task Owner (T.O.) Access Layer: This Layer provides the interfaces through which task owners interact with the task‑posting platform. It exposes the protocols required for safe and reliable operation, including mechanisms for submitting new tasks, tracking task status, and updating, retracting, or modifying previously posted tasks. This layer also supports the communication requirements needed for rich interaction—such as multi‑modal exchanges, session management, and secure transport between task owners and the platform. Standardizing this layer enables task owners of different types and from different vendors’ ecosystems to interact with task‑posting platforms in a consistent, interoperable manner. It should be noted here that also the task-posting platforms can come from different vendors as well, so standardized access layer is essential.

  • Agent Access Layer: The Agent Access Layer provides the standardized interfaces through which agents interact with the task‑posting platform and with other system components. It exposes the protocols required for safe task discovery, capability advertisement, proposal submission, and session establishment. This layer also supports secure communication, multi‑modal exchanges, status reporting, and lifecycle management for agent‑initiated interactions. By defining common access and communication primitives, the Agent Access Layer enables heterogeneous agents—potentially from different vendors or ecosystems—to interoperate reliably with task‑posting platforms and with one another.

  • Task-Posting Platform: The Task‑Posting Platform is the environment in which task owners publish tasks (task cards for instance) and make them visible to eligible agents. It maintains the authoritative catalog of active tasks and enforces the policies under which tasks may be posted, viewed, or acted upon. Platforms may apply subject‑matter restrictions, require specific agent capabilities, or limit participation to task owners who meet defined trust or compliance requirements. The platform is responsible for ensuring fair and consistent visibility across all posted tasks and for exposing standardized APIs that allow agents to search, filter, and retrieve tasks in a predictable manner. In addition to basic posting and retrieval, the platform may support task lifecycle management, admission control, rate limiting, prioritization rules, and mechanisms for handling updates, cancellations, and task‑owner clarifications. This allows it to provide necessary OAM functionality for task owners. Although platforms may differ in internal design, they are expected to expose interoperable interfaces that conform to the specifications defined by the Task Owner Access Layer and the Agent Access Layer, enabling cross‑vendor compatibility and consistent behavior across deployments.

  • The Communication Link: The Communication Link is an optional component that enables direct, bilateral interaction between task owners and agents after initial discovery. Its purpose is to off‑load certain interaction responsibilities from the access layers by providing a secure channel through which both parties can negotiate task‑specific details. Once an agent identifies a suitable task, it may use this link to contact the task owner directly and establish the terms under which the task will be fulfilled. These terms may include trust requirements, handling expectations, privacy constraints, compensation models, escalation paths, or any other operational parameters relevant to the task. This link supports private sessions that operate outside the default policies of the task‑posting platform while still relying on standardized, regulated, and secured communication protocols defined by the ecosystem. It allows richer negotiation patterns—such as multi‑modal exchanges, iterative clarification, or structured contract formation—without requiring the platform to mediate every interaction.

4.2. Task cards

  • what are task cards?

  • how are they generated? (there should be a mechanism to generate these) -- potential for standardization.

  • What are some proposed task card structures? -- potential for many IETF drafts and solution proposal.

  • How are task cards used by agents to satisfy the different scenarios considered? -- (these task cards need to be designed such that they can be utilized to fulfill the above scenarios. Mechanism by which this is done might not be in IETF scope, but perhaps would invite creative designing proposals)

4.3. Task discovery

  • How are task cards stored? (authorization, authentication, standardization) --- potential for standardization

  • How are task cards published and handled after being published? (expiration, prioritization, fairness) -- potential for standardization

  • What are the possible different approaches to discovering them in light of the different scenarios being considered? -- potential for standardization

  • How to ensure secure and private access to task cards? -- potential for standardization

  • Centralized and decentralized discovery?

  • Efficient discovery? -- This is likely out of scope for the IETF, making it more suitable as a research topic for the IRTF. Alternatively, this could be handled through engineered, standardized methods, such as hierarchical or DNS-based discovery.

4.4. Interaction between task owners and agents

  • How do agents connect with task owners? (authentication, validation, and authorization) -- potential for standardization

  • How can task owners monitor progress on their tasks? -- potential for standardization

  • How do agents charge and bill for their service? -- This is likely out of scope for the IETF

  • What happens if agents did not fulfill the task up to standards required? -- IETF can provide a way to express satisfaction, similar to ai-pref

  • how to insure privacy and security? -- potential for standardization. Perhaps proposal such as ARDP might find utility here.

  • authorization and authentication of agent? -- potential for standardization

  • authorization and authentication of task owner? -- potential for standardization

  • authorization and authentication of billboards? -- potential for standardization

5. Complementary operations format

This section aims to describe how the two models can operate side‑by‑side: registry‑based discovery continues to offer a stable, authoritative directory of agents, while the billboard‑driven approach adds dynamic task posting, proactive agent proposals, richer reputation building, and improved handling of vague or complex tasks. Together, they form a hybrid discovery ecosystem in which registries provide long‑term identity and credentials, and the billboard layer provides real‑time matching, diagnostics, coalition formation, and opportunities for newcomers—each compensating for the other’s weaknesses.

5.3. ARDP role in task discovery

Being a control-plane protocol that is designed to provide stable agent identifiers, authenticated registration, and authorized endpoint resolution in distributed and federated environment, the ARDP can facilitate many features necessary for the operation of the Task Discovery Ecosystem proposed here. To be exact, ARDP can:

  • Serve as the authoritative identity and endpoint binding layer for agents that respond to task postings.

  • Allow Agents discovering tasks via a billboard mechanism to:

    • Validate peer agent identities when forming coalitions.

    • Resolve authoritative endpoints for inter-agent coordination.

    • Verify provenance and federation trust relationships.

  • Task billboards may reference ARDP-resolvable AIDs instead of duplicating identity records.

However, what the ARDP is not meant to do is:

  • Task decomposition logic.

  • Coalition formation strategies.

  • Runtime authorization enforcement within an agent.

  • Reputation scoring or bidding mechanisms.

These functions can operate above ARDP or alongside it in complementary architectures such as the proposed task discovery model.

Thus, in light of the above, it is clear that ARDP complements both registry-based discovery and billboard-based task discovery by providing a secure and interoperable control-plane foundation.

6. Conclusion and Discussions

6.1. Summary of advantages of the proposed Task Discovery Ecosystem

  • A task‑card storage entity is dynamic and demand‑driven: posted tasks expire or are archived once completed, so the active dataset shrinks and grows with workload. This contrasts with registry‑based approaches that must persist and replicate every agent profile indefinitely. By keeping only active task records readily searchable, the proposed model reduces persistent storage, indexing, replication bandwidth, and update churn, aligning infrastructure cost with actual demand while still supporting optional archival and a small authoritative registry for long‑lived credentials, making it a better scalable solution.

  • The proposed model reduces the task‑owner’s burden of finding the right agent by shifting discovery work to agents: agents that believe they are a good fit proactively submit proposals, which narrows the owner’s search space and removes the need for owners to precisely specify required skills.

  • For non urgent tasks that owners do not want to spend a lot for them to be done, they are posted for agents to bid on and owners can choose the best offer. This also allows idle agents to have a chance to make money and perhaps help with load balancing

  • By allowing agents to proactively propose for posted tasks, the platform enables newcomers and under‑exposed agents to build verifiable reputation through completed work, reducing cold‑start barriers and improving match quality—provided the system enforces admission controls, verification steps, and incentive mechanisms to limit noise and gaming.

  • The billboard model augments registry‑based discovery rather than replacing it: owners retain registry search capabilities while also posting raw tasks to receive proactive proposals. This hybrid approach preserves existing workflows, lowers the barrier for non‑expert owners, and enables richer matching strategies; to work well it requires interoperable metadata, admission controls, and clear ranking/deduplication rules so the two channels remain complementary and secure.

6.2. IETF work required to realize the vision

The proposed billboard‑like agent initiated task discovery model offers clear benefits, but substantial IETF work is required to make it interoperable, secure, and scalable. Standards are needed for task‑posting formats, machine‑readable credentials, admission and discovery APIs, policy profiles, privacy‑preserving attestations, and budgeted search semantics; without these, owner‑defined trust policies will fragment the ecosystem, invite spoofing, and force unscalable manual vetting. The IETF should therefore define minimal, composable building blocks that preserve owner flexibility while enabling automated verification, cross‑domain discovery, and fair matching across implementations.

  • Task posting and metadata formats: a compact, extensible schema for raw task descriptions, required attributes, and diagnostic prompts.

  • Discovery and billboard APIs: standardized endpoints and query semantics for posting tasks, submitting proposals, and retrieving shortlists.

  • Standardized machine‑readable credentials and attestations: interoperable formats and protocols for signed capability claims, provenance, selective‑disclosure identity attributes, and revocation signals, enabling automated trust decisions between task owners, billboards, and agents without relying on proprietary or ad‑hoc vetting.

  • Policy profiles and admission rules: interoperable assurance levels (e.g., basic/verified/high‑assurance) and a way to express owner preferences as machine‑evaluable policies.

  • Search semantics and stop rules: standardized notions of budgeted search, progressive widening, and marginal‑gain stoppage so clients and servers can interoperate on when to halt exploration. This is also needed to limit the possibility of overload the read function of the agent/task registries.

  • Coalition formation primitives: lightweight protocols for capability advertisement, role negotiation, payment split templates, and failure recovery.

  • Fairness and anti‑gaming controls: mechanisms that give newcomers a fair chance and prevent manipulation of the matching and reputation systems. This includes onboarding micro‑tasks for new agents, freshness boosts so proposals from less‑visible agents are not buried, reputation‑normalization rules to prevent score inflation, and signals for detecting sybil or duplicate agents.

  • Privacy and selective disclosure: mechanisms (attribute attestations, minimal disclosure) that let agents prove claims without exposing sensitive data.

  • Audit, logging, and revocation: tamper‑evident logging mechanisms, standardized revocation lists, and dispute‑resolution hooks that allow task owners, agents, and billboards to verify what happened during a task lifecycle across different administrative domains. This includes consistent formats for recording proposals, decisions, completions, and failures; mechanisms for revoking compromised or misbehaving agents; and interoperable audit trails that support cross‑domain verification and accountability. Without these shared mechanisms, it becomes difficult to detect misconduct, resolve disputes, or maintain trust in a multi‑vendor, multi‑platform ecosystem.

  • Operational guidance and standardized profiles — a set of shared deployment guidelines, recommended defaults, and well‑defined configuration profiles that help different implementations behave consistently. This includes safe presets for non‑expert task owners (e.g., “fast match”, “high assurance”), normative guidance on how to apply admission policies and search budgets, and test vectors that allow implementers to verify correct behavior. Without this layer of operational guidance, platforms may interpret the same mechanisms differently, leading to fragmentation, inconsistent trust decisions, and unpredictable user experience.

7. Security Considerations

Security considerations are as outlined within the document under the privacy and security requirements

8. IANA Considerations

This document has no IANA actions.

Contributors

Hesham Moussa
Huawei Canada
Arashmid Akhavain
Huawei Canada
Roberto Pioli
Independent
Jim Mozley
Infoblox, Inc.
Nic Williams
Infoblox, Inc.

Authors' Addresses

Hesham Moussa
Huawei Canada
Arashmid Akhavain
Huawei Canada
Roberto Pioli
Independent
Jim Mozley
Infoblox, Inc.
Nic Williams
Infoblox, Inc.