21. References

References are split into normative (a conforming implementation depends on them), foundational (the published results the protocol’s design rests on), and informative (background). Reference implementations are listed last; the published conformance vectors (§17.4) are the byte-level interop contract for this final version.

21.1 Normative References

[RFC 2119] Bradner, S. (1997). Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. IETF BCP 14, RFC 2119.

[RFC 8174] Leiba, B. (2017). Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words. IETF BCP 14, RFC 8174. Only UPPERCASE keywords carry normative force in this specification.

[RFC 6455] Fette, I. & Melnikov, A. (2011). The WebSocket Protocol. IETF RFC 6455. Relay transport (Section 4.4).

[RFC 8032] Josefsson, S. & Liusvaara, I. (2017). Edwards-Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA). IETF RFC 8032. Ed25519 node identity and CMB signatures (Sections 3, 18.3.1).

[RFC 7748] Langley, A., Hamburg, M. & Turner, S. (2016). Elliptic Curves for Security. IETF RFC 7748. X25519 key agreement for end-to-end CMB encryption (Section 18.2.1).

[RFC 8439] Nir, Y. & Langley, A. (2018). ChaCha20 and Poly1305 for IETF Protocols. IETF RFC 8439. AEAD construction underlying relay-transit E2E encryption (Section 18.2.1).

[RFC 9562] Davis, K., Peabody, B. & Leach, P. (2024). Universally Unique IDentifiers (UUIDs). IETF RFC 9562. Node identifiers (Section 3.1).

[RFC 8259] Bray, T. (2017). The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data Interchange Format. IETF STD 90, RFC 8259. Frame payload encoding (Section 4.1).

[RFC 6763] Cheshire, S. & Krochmal, M. (2013). DNS-Based Service Discovery. IETF RFC 6763. LAN peer discovery (Section 5.1).

[JSON-Schema] Wright, A., Andrews, H., Hutton, B. & Dennis, G. (2022). JSON Schema: A Media Type for Describing JSON Documents. IETF Internet-Draft, draft 2020-12. Frame validation (Section 20).

21.2 Foundational Papers

The protocol’s no-center, receiver-autonomous-admission, and lineage-provenance design rests on these published results. (Numeric defaults and thresholds are engineering choices of the runtime, not results derived in these papers.)

[Mesh-Inference] Xu, H. (2026). Mesh Inference: A Formal Model of Collective Inference Without a Center. arXiv:2606.19537. Convergence, identification-completeness, and observation-only confidentiality for the admission/emission policy (Sections 9, 12).

[Liquid-Necessity] Xu, H. (2026). On the Necessity of a Liquid Substrate for Mesh Intelligence. arXiv:2606.28413. The adaptive-timescale and elapsed-gap conditions any fixed-weight agent must meet to fold irregular peer arrivals online (Section 13).

[SVAF] Xu, H. (2026). Symbolic-Vector Attention Fusion for Collective Intelligence. arXiv:2604.03955 [cs.MA, cs.AI]. Receiver admission with per-category evaluation evidence (Section 9).

[MMP-Paper] Xu, H. (2026). Mesh Memory Protocol: Semantic Infrastructure for Multi-Agent LLM Systems. arXiv:2604.19540. The protocol described at v0.2.x; this specification covers the same contracts.

[MeloTune] Xu, H. (2026). MeloTune: On-Device Arousal Learning and Peer-to-Peer Mood Coupling. arXiv:2604.10815. The first deployed reference.

21.3 Informative References

[CfC] Hasani, R. et al. (2022). Closed-form continuous-time neural networks. Nature Machine Intelligence, 4, 992–1003. The continuous-time substrate of Layer 6.

[Kuramoto] Kuramoto, Y. (1975). Self-entrainment of a population of coupled non-linear oscillators. Lecture Notes in Physics, 39, 420–422. Conceptual model of coupled convergence.

[Russell] Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178. The valence/arousal basis of the mood category.

[Autopoiesis] Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel Publishing. Conceptual framing of a node as a self-producing boundary.

21.4 Reference Implementations

[SYM] Open reference implementation (Node.js, package @sym-bot/sym): github.com/sym-bot/sym

[XMESH-CORE] Proprietary conforming runtime used to validate implementation boundaries. Its source is not part of the open specification and is not required for independent conformance.

[SYM-Swift] Reference implementation (Swift): github.com/sym-bot/sym-swift