Beyond State Machines: Executing Network Procedures with Agentic Tool-Calling Sequences
Authors: Purna Sai Garigipati, Onur Ayan, Kishor Chandra Joshi, Xueli An
Abstract
Agentic AI will be an essential enabling technology for designing future mobile communication systems, which could provide flexible and customized services, automate complex network operations, and drive autonomous decision-making across the network. This work studies how Large Language Model (LLM)-based network AI agents can be utilized to execute network procedures expressed as sequences of tool invocations. We investigate four approaches, which differ in how the agent obtains the procedure and in how execution is distributed between the agent and the underlying tools. We evaluated the latency and execution correctness across these approaches using a User Equipment (UE) IP allocation procedure as a case study. Furthermore, we conduct a stress test to examine how many sequential procedural steps an LLM agent can reliably execute before failure. Our results show that approaches relying on iterative agent-side reasoning incur higher latency and are more prone to execution errors, while approaches where the procedure is encapsulated within a single tool, which internally orchestrates the required steps by invoking other tools, reduce latency by limiting repeated reasoning. The stress-test results further show that the model with advanced tool-calling capability maintains reliable execution over longer procedures than the other evaluated models; however, all models exhibit reliability degradation as procedure length increases, revealing clear execution limits in multi-step tool-based workflows. To systematically analyze failures in procedure execution, we introduce a procedure-specific error taxonomy that categorizes deviations in multi-step procedural execution.
In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain \emph{static endpoints} that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an \emph{executable tool program} that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.
Large language model (LLM) agents provide a promising interface for command-line-based network operations, but a plausible command may still fail or introduce operational risk after execution. Existing approaches mainly focus on command generation or final configuration correctness, and do not use execution-grounded experience to jointly improve candidate coverage and action selection. We propose an execution-grounded dual-path consequence-aware agent for CLI-based SONiC operations, which generates multiple complete actions, predicts their execution consequences, and selects the final action through utility- and risk-aware reranking. The proposal-side path abstracts reusable operational lessons into retrievable guidance to improve feasible-action coverage without modifying the proposal LLM, while the selection-side path adapts the consequence predictor through session-level LoRA updates using real SSH feedback to improve conditional selection quality. Experiments over multi-turn SONiC operation sessions with different Qwen3 proposal models show that the framework improves feasible-action coverage and top-1 execution success, and that the two adaptation paths provide complementary gains over interaction.
Large Language Model (LLM) agents rely on external tools to perform multistage tasks. Existing agent frameworks typically assume that tool calls are atomic and return binary success or failure signals. However, real-world systems exhibit non-atomic behaviors such as timeouts after dispatch, delayed visibility, and partial state updates. These mismatches lead to reliability issues including duplicate actions, task success, and unnecessary tool executions. A lightweight, verification-aware tool wrapper is introduced that augments tool calls with postcondition verification, verify-before-retry logic, and idempotency keys. The approach is evaluated in a controlled simulated environment with injected non-atomic failures across multiple task templates. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces duplicate actions, while maintaining comparable task success rates. Overall, the findings suggest that strengthening tool interaction semantics is a promising direction for improving LLM agent reliability without requiring modifications to the underlying language model.