Communication Between Agents › Glossary

Acknowledgment: A message sent by a recipient to confirm that it received and understood a previous message, used to ensure reliable communication.

Asynchronous Communication: A pattern where the sender doesn't wait for a response and continues with other work, useful for fire-and-forget messages and parallel processing.

Consensus Protocol: A set of rules for how multiple agents reach agreement on decisions through proposals, voting, and tallying results according to defined thresholds.

Conversation Thread: A sequence of related messages between agents, maintained with a thread ID and message history to preserve context across multiple exchanges.

Message Broker: A component that manages publish-subscribe communication, routing messages from publishers to all subscribed agents based on topics.

Message Envelope: The wrapper around message content that includes metadata like sender, recipient, timestamp, and message type, enabling proper routing and handling.

Publish-Subscribe: A communication pattern where agents subscribe to topics of interest and receive all messages published to those topics, enabling one-to-many communication.

Request-Response: A synchronous communication pattern where one agent sends a request and waits for another agent to send back a response before continuing.

Structured Data: Information formatted in a standardized way (like JSON) with defined fields and types, making it easier for agents to parse and use reliably.

Task Delegation Protocol: A coordination protocol that defines how one agent requests work from another, including acknowledgment, progress updates, completion, and error handling.

Timeout: A mechanism that limits how long an agent waits for a response before concluding the message was lost or the recipient is unavailable.