Agent-OSI: An Interoperability Architecture for Communication and Settlement in the Decentralized Internet of Agents
TL;DR
Results show that, for generative workloads, end-to-end latency is dominated by task execution rather than settlement confirmation, and that keeping negotiation and delivery off the settlement backend reduces per-session settlement cost by approximately 51\% relative to a more on-chain baseline.
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating the shift from an Internet of information to an Internet of Agents (IoA), where autonomous entities discover services, negotiate, execute tasks, and exchange value. Yet today's agents are still confined to platform silos and proprietary interfaces, lacking a common stack for interoperability, trust, and pay-per-use settlement. This article proposes \textit{Agent-OSI}, a functional interoperability architecture for a decentralized IoA, whose core contribution is agent-to-agent (A2A) communication and a Web-compatible, backend-agnostic settlement protocol built on HTTP 402 (Payment Required); identity, verifiable execution, and semantic orchestration are treated as boundary layers with interfaces to existing standards. We treat HTTP 402 as an application-layer challenge-response primitive -- analogous to HTTP 401 for authentication -- whose settlement backend (escrow contract, payment channel, or signed off-chain receipt) is a pluggable choice, instantiated via a blockchain escrow in our prototype. We implement a prototype and evaluate its communication and settlement performance. Results show that, for generative workloads, end-to-end latency is dominated by task execution rather than settlement confirmation, and that keeping negotiation and delivery off the settlement backend reduces per-session settlement cost by approximately 51\% relative to a more on-chain baseline.