The bio-edge: a survey and research agenda for the Internet of Bio-Nano Things, 2026-2035

The Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) extends the Internet of Things into the biochemical domain of living systems through nanoscale bio-engineered devices that sense, actuate, and communicate primarily via molecular signalling. Eleven years after the founding vision of Akyildiz et al. 4, the field has accumulated working architectures, microfluidic testbeds, and mature channel models, but its system-integration challenges - latency, privacy, and energy - are substantially edge-computing challenges: in-body decision loops cannot tolerate cloud round-trip latency, biomolecular data cannot safely stream to remote servers, and harvested-power devices cannot continuously transmit raw high-rate signals. This survey reframes the IoBNT layer stack as a five-layer bio-edge reference architecture in which the bio-cyber interface (BCI, distinct from brain-computer interface) is upgraded from a transduction gateway to a first-class compute layer with its own latency, energy, and trust accounting. We construct a DOI-deduplicated bibliometric snapshot of 311 entries, identify three under-occupied subtopics that constitute the field's strategic white space - TinyML on harvested power, federated learning across edge gateways, and Bio-SDN orchestration - and survey the technical state of each. The centrepiece is a ten-prediction research agenda for 2026-2035 with each prediction stated as a dated metric, a causal mechanism, and a falsifier, designed to give the IoBNT community a structured object that subsequent work can measure itself against.