Publish/Subscribe for Edge Intelligence: Systematic Review and Future Prospects

The exponential growth of IoT has led to billions of devices generating massive data streams. However, the resource-limited nature of IoT devices, coupled with the rise of interactive applications, requires efficient processing across the Device-Edge-Cloud continuum. The publish/subscribe (pub/sub) model has emerged as a preferred paradigm due to its scalability and flexibility. This review critically analyzes pub/sub systems, examining their architectures, security mechanisms, protocols, and real-world implementations. Unlike previous surveys, we explore their role in EdgeOps and real-time applications, identifying key limitations and opportunities for enhancement. Furthermore, we highlight underexplored challenges, such as adaptive message routing, and discuss how AI-driven pub/sub frameworks could improve system autonomy and responsiveness. This survey provides a roadmap for advancing pub/sub mechanisms to meet the demands of interactive distributed computing environments. Additionally, we propose the integration of agentic AI to enhance adaptability and autonomy. We further identify several key challenges that have the potential to shape the future of the pub/sub model, and we present these as important open issues for further exploration.