PrintHub: A Distributed Cloud-Edge Architecture for Automated Multi-Tenant Print Queuing, Hardware Spooling, and Real-Time Payment Reconciliation

In developing urban centers and academic institutions, traditional commercial copy and print centers continue to rely heavily on manual, unoptimized workflows. Customers traditionally transfer sensitive personal and academic documents via unsecured USB flash drives or instant messaging platforms, leading to severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities, manual pricing errors, physical queue congestion, and cash-handling discrepancies. This paper presents PrintHub, an end-to-end, multi-tenant distributed cloud-edge printing ecosystem designed to automate the entire lifecycle of commercial print jobs. The system incorporates binary document inspection engines for real-time page-count extraction across multi-format documents (PDF, DOCX, images), an event-driven FIFO queue synchronized using lightweight Server-Sent Events (SSE), a decentralized local hardware agent interfacing directly with native operating system print spoolers via an abstracted multi-port hardware bridge, and a dual-channel financial settlement pipeline integrating Razorpay and dynamic UPI QR verification. Experimental evaluations demonstrate a 73% reduction in turnaround time, zero manual pricing overhead, and sub-second queue synchronization latency under concurrent client loads.