Networking for AI Proposed Research Group NET4AI

Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)

Goal

The proposed Networking for AI Research Group (NET4AI) brings together researchers and the Internet community to investigate the networking foundations of distributed AI systems spanning multiple stakeholders. It provides a forum for long-term architectural research beyond the immediate requirements addressed by IETF working groups.

Scope

NET4AI explores Internet support for autonomous agents, decentralized AI systems, and communication architectures for AI ecosystems. Its scope extends beyond individual datacenters to the challenges of operating AI workloads across networks and administrative domains.

Background

Generative and agentic AI have prompted new protocol discussions in the IETF and growing research interest in networking for training, inference, and large language model serving. NET4AI complements these activities by examining longer-term questions about Internet architecture, decentralization, and support for networked AI systems.

Research areas

  • Adapting Internet protocols to support AI workloads.
  • Testbeds and benchmarks for research on agentic network management.
  • Communication protocols tailored to agents beyond human-readable, real-time interactions.
  • Caching and content distribution for AI, including key-value cache distribution for inference beyond a single datacenter.
  • Agent identity, naming, and addressing across domains, including decentralized approaches to trustworthy agent communication.
  • Security requirements introduced by agentic AI.

Mode of Operation

NET4AI will assess and develop experimental tools, including simulators and testbeds, and collect and share datasets for reproducible experiments. The group will encourage research on networked AI systems, new architectures such as key-value-cache-centric and mixture-of-experts systems, inter-datacenter communication, and security. It will also explore principled approaches to communication among agents.

The proposed charter and current group information are available on the IETF Datatracker.

Membership

Membership in the NET4AI is open to all interested parties.

Chairs

NET4AI is chaired by Antoine Fressancourt and Dirk Kutscher.

Mailing List

The NET4AI mailing list is net4ai@irtf.org. To subscribe or access the list archives, visit the mailman page.

Datatracker

Documents and meeting materials for the NET4AI can be found on the IETF datatracker.