The Cost of a Hop: Benchmarking NLIP and A2A

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.04053v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agents built on Large Language Models (LLMs) need standardized protocols to interoperate across systems. Several now exist (A2A, MCP, ACP, ANP, NLIP), but the Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP) has not appeared in any controlled performance study, and no work has measured where an agent protocol's latency is spent. We compare NLIP and the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol empirically, decomposing latency into message creation, conn