Mobile Embodied Agent Network (MEAN): Integrated Framework, Enabling Technologies, and Task-Driven Deployment

Abstract

Mobile networks are evolving from human-centered, data-oriented communication infrastructures toward machine- and/or agent-dominant, task-oriented platforms that are to serve the rapidly increasing networked machines and embodied agents. In order to fulfill the newly arose complex task objectives, the framework of future mobile network is to be innovated to reflect and facilitate the intrinsic interplay and integration of the underlying processes of perception, communication, computation, decision, action, and feedback, etc. This survey establishes the mobile embodied agent network (MEAN) as a task-oriented networking paradigm in which networking and distributed intelligence are jointly organized around closed-loop embodied task execution. We first establish a unified MEAN framework that explains how network resources and intelligent functions jointly support embodied task execution, and extend its performance indicators from conventional communication metrics to embodied task outcomes and cross-layer system effects. With this framework, we analyze three complementary enabling mechanisms that form a cognition-interaction-adaption loop. Large artificial intelligence (AI) models provide high-level cognition, token communication connects this cognition with distributed agents through shared semantic representations, and reinforcement learning closes the loop by adapting system operation to network, task, and physical feedback. We further investigate the bidirectional interplay between MEAN and emerging technologies, showing how they mutually extend system capabilities and reshape task-oriented network design. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future research directions toward the practical realization of MEAN over real joint communication and computation platform.