The Cost of Saying Hello: An Empirical Study of Handshake Overhead in AI Agent Communication Protocols

arXiv cs.AIOctober 23, 2026en

arXiv:2610.30151v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every interaction between AI agents begins with a handshake: the initiating agent must locate its counterpart, learn what it can do, and establish a session before the first useful message can be sent. Surveys of agent communication protocols name handshake overhead as an efficiency criterion, yet none report measurements. This paper presents the first empirical, phase-decomposed benchmark of the handshake in three major agent protocols: MCP (in both its 2025 initialize and 2026 discover eras), A2A, and ACP. Using each protocol's official SDK, we instrument every request for round trips, per-phase latency, wire bytes, and token cost across cold

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