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Terrestrial data centers suffer from a growing carbon footprint that could contribute with 14% to global CO2 emissions by 2040. High Altitude Platform (HAP) is a promising airborne technology that can unleash the computing frontier in the stratospheric range by hosting a flying data center. HAP systems can endorse the sustainable green operation of data centers thanks to the naturally low atmospheric temperature that saves cooling energy and its large surface that can host solar panels covering energy requirements. Throughout this article, we define the operation limitations of this innovative solution and study the energy-efficiency-related trade-offs. Then, we shed light on the significance of the scalability of the data center-enabled HAP architecture by investigating potential bottlenecks and proposing different deployment scenarios to avoid network congestion. We also highlight the importance of the management agility of the data center-enabled HAP system by defining effective management techniques that yield high-performing data centers. Our results demonstrate that deploying a single data center-enabled HAP can save 12% of the electricity costs.

The integration between the satellite network and the terrestrial network will play a key role in the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) of mobile cellular networks thanks to the wide coverage and bandwidth offered by satellite networks. To leverage this integration, we propose a proactive traffic offloading scheme in an integrated multi-satellite terrestrial network (IMSTN) that considers the future networks' heterogeneity and predicts their variability. Our proposed offloading scheme hinges on traffic prediction to answer the stringent requirements of data-rate, latency and reliability imposed by heterogeneous and coexisting services and traffic namely enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC). However, the fulfilment of these requirements during offloading in dynamic IMSTN comes at the expense of significant energy consumption and introduces inherently supplementary latency. Therefore, our offloading scheme aims to balance the fundamental trade-offs first between energy consumption and the achievable data-rate and second between energy consumption and latency while meeting the respective needs of the present traffic. Our findings prove the importance of the cooperation between the multi-satellite network and the terrestrial network conditioned by traffic prediction to enhance the performance of IMTSN in terms of latency and energy consumption.

Cloud service behavior mainly in dependability terms is nowadays a highly requested feature since cloud environments are failure prone. As a matter of fact, cloud consumers are more reluctant for cloud adoption given the dramatic impacts of failures in these environments. In order to convince cloud consumers with the fulfillment of the promised dependability rates, we need to assure dependability differently to the traditional way where the main focus is on the Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS and for the cloud provider side only. Therefore, we present in this paper a model based on The Open Group Architecture Framework or TOGAF, that assures dependability in all cloud services by taking into consideration various cloud actors and through integrating its mechanisms in distinct dimensions.