MCP Bridge: A Lightweight, LLM-Agnostic RESTful Proxy for Model Context Protocol Servers
About
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly augmented with external tools through standardized interfaces like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). However, current MCP implementations face critical limitations: they typically require local process execution through STDIO transports, making them impractical for resource-constrained environments like mobile devices, web browsers, and edge computing. We present MCP Bridge, a lightweight RESTful proxy that connects to multiple MCP servers and exposes their capabilities through a unified API. Unlike existing solutions, MCP Bridge is fully LLM-agnostic, supporting any backend regardless of vendor. The system implements a risk-based execution model with three security levels-standard execution, confirmation workflow, and Docker isolation-while maintaining backward compatibility with standard MCP clients. However, reliable execution within this framework requires models that can strictly adhere to protocol schemas. To this end, we also fine-tuned the Qwen3 4B and 8B model family on the Agent-Ark/Toucan-1.5M dataset using four Reinforcement Learning techniques: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), Dr. GRPO, Beta Normalization Policy Optimization (BNPO), and Decoupled Clip and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO). Evaluated on the MCPToolBench++ benchmark, our optimized model achieves an F1 score of 73.0% that outperforms GPT-OSS-120B (62.17%) and remains competitive with the 70B+ parameter baselines. Evaluation demonstrates that MCP Bridge successfully addresses the constraints of direct MCP connections while providing enhanced security controls and cross-platform compatibility, enabling sophisticated LLM-powered applications in previously inaccessible environments.