Cloud Platform Access Support Architecture for Underwater Habitat Based Subscribers

Subscribers in underwater locations access cloud content aboard terrestrial data centres at high latency. However, it is important to access cloud content at low latency. This necessitates the design of solutions enabling low latency cloud content access for underwater subscribers. This paper proposes network architecture for the underwater habitat subscribers. It uses underwater data centre due to its low latency computing platform access. Underwater data centres are considered because they are closer to subscribers aboard underwater habitats. They also have a low cooling cost since they benefit from using the ocean's cold water. The network uses autonomous underwater vehicles as data transfer nodes between underwater habitat subscribers and computing platforms. Evaluation shows that the proposed network architecture reduces latency by an average of at least 26.8% and up to 84.6%.