OpenAN (Open Autonomous Network)

Abstract

The first open-source project for carrier agent collaboration, contributed by China Mobile and Huawei and hosted by Linux Foundation Networking as a candidate project; unveiled at MWC Barcelona in March 2026 and released at MWC Shanghai on 25 June 2026, with the first offline meeting of its eight founding members in Copenhagen on 30 June 2026. It implements A2A-T (Agent to Agent Protocol for Telecom), which extends the general A2A protocol into telecom scenarios across four domains (Task-T, Notification-T, Negotiation-T and Authorization-T), and ships three categories of components: the A2A-T common component (SDK, Registry Centre, Orchestration Centre), an Agent Framework, and an AN ontology that builds a telecom-domain knowledge graph for cross-agent semantic alignment. The registry centre is fully localizable and supports interconnection, discovery and scheduling at the thousand-agent scale, keeping all interaction traffic inside the local network and shrinking the attack surface. China Mobile chairs the project; governance sits with an Adopter Advisory Committee. The stated goal is a virtuous cycle of standards guiding direction, open source accelerating deployment and practice feeding back into standards, aligned with TM Forum autonomous-network reference architecture with commercial verification targeted for 2027.