**1. Introduction**

The internet comprises multiple converging technologies that interact together in a global network. Information access via the internet faces a significant number of challenges. These challenges influence the ease with which information can be accessed via the internet. The quality of service (QoS) associated with internet access is determined by metrics such as channel capacity, latency, throughput and packet loss rate.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Advances in networking have played a significant role in internet evolution. For example, the internet initially used wired technology as the communication media; however, the internet is now accessed via wireless radio [1–3]. This transition increases the mobility of subscribers seeking to access data [4, 5]. The emergence of smartphones has improved subscriber ability to access the internet. This increased access requires network algorithms to support the realization of enhanced QoS in fifth generation (5G) wireless networks and beyond 5G (B5G) networks.

Internet access via wireless technologies benefits from new technologies such as: (i) new variants of the internet protocol (IP) and the transmission control protocol (TCP) [6–10], (ii) improved packet switching [11–13], (iii) World Wide Web [14], (iv) IEEE 802.11 wireless network standard [15], and (v) artificial intelligence [16, 17].

Currently, there is increased interest in space exploration leading to the development of technologies such as small satellites [18, 19] and aerial vehicles such as stratospheric platforms [19] and drones [20]. The development of these technologies enables capital constrained organizations to engage in space exploration. This also enables the emergence of new applications requiring internet access such as space tourism. The emergence of space tourism [21–39] requires a solution to providing uninterrupted internet access to subscribers aboard a space vehicle, as well as improving accessibility to the cloud content internet.


**Table 1.** Acronyms used in this paper.



**Table 2.** Set of notations used in this paper.

This chapter addresses two challenges: it designs (i) a network infrastructure with associated mechanisms to ensure continued access for space tourist subscribers aboard a space vehicle and (ii) a solution to improve the cloud service accessibility in developing nations. The chapter makes the following contributions:

**1.** Firstly, it proposes a network architecture that incorporates the space tourist subscriber in commercial space flights. The space tourist subscriber requires access to cloud-based content and the proposed network architecture ensures that there is a continuity of access to cloud content at every tier via the proposed handover mechanism.


The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 formulates the problem being addressed in this chapter. Section 3 presents the proposed mechanisms. Section 4 formulates the performance model. Section 5 presents and discusses the simulation results and performance benefits. Section 6 is the conclusion.

The list of acronyms and the set of notations used in this paper are shown in **Tables 1** and **2** respectively.
