Sustainability–Resilience Trade-Offs in Edge-Enabled Systems: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

Edge-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) systems are rapidly becoming the operational substrate of mission-critical infrastructure spanning industrial automation, smart healthcare, vehicular ecosystems, and cyber–physical environments. The distributed, resource-constrained, and physically exposed nature of these systems makes them persistent targets for a diverse and evolving spectrum of cyber attacks. Critically, cyber attacks on edge-enabled IoT systems do not merely threaten data confidentiality; they simultaneously erode two interdependent operational objectives: sustainability, the ability of the system to maintain continuous, energy-efficient operation within its resource envelope and resilience, the ability to absorb adversarial disruptions, recover operational continuity, and adapt to prevent recurrence. The structural conflict between defending sustainability and maintaining resilience under active cyberattack conditions constitutes a research gap that prior surveys have not systematically addressed. This survey introduces a cyber attack-driven Sustainability–Resilience (S-R) framework that positions cyber threats as the primary stressor forcing a bilateral trade-off between operational efficiency and continuity in edge-enabled IoT systems. A five-layer, attack-centric taxonomy is developed spanning: network-layer attacks (DDoS, MitM, routing manipulation, jamming); device and firmware attacks (malware injection, firmware compromise, sensor spoofing); data and AI/ML attacks (adversarial inputs, data poisoning, model inversion); federated and Byzantine attacks (gradient poisoning, backdoor injection, free-riding); and advanced persistent threats (APT-class intrusions, ransomware, LLM prompt injection, zero-day exploitation). For each attack class, the survey systematically analyses the impact on sustainability and resilience objectives, the resulting S-R conflict, and the state-of-the-art defensive strategies. The framework is formalised as a maximin optimisation over the joint S-R objective surface, incorporating the adaptive, goal-directed nature of the adversary through a game-theoretic formulation. Cross-domain analysis spanning Industrial IoT, smart healthcare, Internet of Vehicles, UAV-assisted IoT, smart grids, and tactical edge networks establishes domain-specific S-R operating constraints under representative attack scenarios. The survey concludes with a structured characterisation of open research challenges and forward-looking directions, providing a prioritised research agenda for advancing simultaneously sustainable and adversarially resilient edge-enabled IoT ecosystems.