Enhancing Model Context Protocol (MCP) with Context-Aware Server Collaboration

Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a widely used framework for enabling LLM-based agents to communicate with external tools and services. The most common implementation of MCP, proposed by Anthropic, heavily relies on a LLM to decompose tasks and issue instructions to servers, which act as stateless executors. In particular, the agents, models, and servers are stateless and do not have access to a global context. However, in tasks involving LLM-driven coordination, it is natural that a Shared Context Store (SCS) could improve the efficiency and coherence of multi-agent workflows by reducing redundancy and enabling knowledge transfer between servers. Thus, in this work, we design and assess the performance of a Context-Aware MCP (CA-MCP) that offloads execution logic to specialized MCP servers that read from and write to a shared context memory, allowing them to coordinate more autonomously in real time. In this design, context management serves as the central mechanism that maintains continuity across task executions by tracking intermediate states and shared variables, thereby enabling persistent collaboration among agents without repeated prompting. We present experiments showing that the CA-MCP can outperform the traditional MCP by reducing the number of LLM calls required for complex tasks and decreasing the frequency of response failures when task conditions are not satisfied, thereby improving overall efficiency and responsiveness. In particular, we conducted experiments on the TravelPlanner and REALM-Bench benchmark datasets and observed statistically significant results indicating the potential advantages of incorporating a shared context store via CA-MCP in LLM-driven multi-agent systems.