Utilizing HAPS Deployed Data Centers in Offloading Cloud Workloads

Recent advances in communication technology has begun to push the data centers towards high altitude platform stations (HAPS) due to their advantages in communication coverage, mobility and cooling. There are plenty of studies that focus on the communication aspects of such devices but the issues regarding deploying micro data centers on HAPS is rarely studied. In the future, there is a potential for a substantial amount of processing power to be offload to such stations to back up terrestrial stations in fog computing scenarios. In this study we have analyzed cloud workload handling and power consumption efficiencies of two different HAPS deployment scenarios. In our simulations, performed with CloudSim Plus, we have experimented with scenarios with varying number of lower and higher altitude HAPS and terrestrial base stations. In our experiments we have identified the trade-offs and cases to provide better performance in handling cloud workloads.