Paper Outlines 5 Architectural Patterns for MCP Servers

TheTuringPost · x · 2026-07-05

This arXiv industry experience paper (2606.30317) systematically reviews the architectural practices of MCP (Model Context Protocol, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024) Servers in LLM applications. The authors analyzed 15 independently developed servers (including 5 production servers from the ANSYR voice AI platform and 10 public servers from the official MCP registry), identifying five common architectural patterns: Resource Gateway, Tool Orchestrator, Stateful Session Server, Proxy Aggregator, and Domain-Specific Adapter. Each is detailed using a design pattern format like Gamma's (Context-Problem-Solution-Consequences).

The paper also documents four anti-patterns and cross-cutting concerns surrounding authentication, version control, and observability. Quantitative evaluations include three aspects: classification consistency by two independent LLM raters on 54 retained servers (Cohen's kappa=0.76); measured loopback end-to-end transmission overhead with cross-host modeling; and a tool quantity study—showing that tool selection accuracy drops below 90% when there are 10-15 tools per context for Claude Haiku 4.5, and 20-30 tools for Sonnet 4. Code, datasets, and prompts have been open-sourced as a reproduction package.

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