Applicability of A2A Protocol for Network Management Agents

The evolution of network management towards autonomic operation requires the deployment of AI agents at various hierarchical layers, including directly on network elements. This transformation shifts network devices from passively managed resources to autonomous entities capable of local decision-making and collaborative problem- solving. This document discusses the applicability of the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol to the network management plane, specifically for communication between Controller Agents (CAs) and Device Agents (DAs). This indicates that the inherent characteristics of Device Agents necessitate the adoption of the agent-to-agent communication paradigm. The document further explores generic workflows, deployment scenarios, and the relationship of A2A with existing network management protocols like NETCONF, RESTCONF, gNMI,and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).