Subject: [Ieprep] Short description of IAA.

From: Yukimitsu Izawa <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 18:07:29 +0900 (JST)

Hello, My name is Yukimitsu Izawa and I am a researcher in IAA which
is research project in WIDE.
I heard from other people, IAA becomes a topic of conversation in
IEPREP WG Mailing list.

Then, I explain about IAA with sort description.
If you have more interest in IAA, please read following papers.

--- Purpose of IAA:

The IAA system is designed to one of disaster-support information
database for large-scale disaster like Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake[1].
System requirements and key technologies are as follows:

* The IAA system must be scalable and flexible. Because we cannot
  predict the size of a disaster in advance, capacity of the system must
  be easily extendible. To consider scalability and flexibility of
  the system, the IAA system consists of IAA cluster nodes and
  IAA transport mechanism.

* The IAA system must be robust and fault tolerant. It means that
  the IAA system must consist multiple components which provide the same
  functionality and they are distributed geographically.
  Even if any part of the system crashes or network congested,
  the total system should continue service without interruption.
  And when crashed parts recover, the system should start to work with
  all of them. To keep robustness and fault tolerant and avoid network
  congestion, all IAA clusters exchange each registered victim information
  by IAA transport mechanism and keeps identical victim information among them.
  Queries are handled by any IAA cluster nodes and they are navigated
  by load distribution mechanism such as weighted round robin.

* The IAA system must protect personal privacy. Personal safety
  information is strongly related to privacy information, and the system
  must protect queries which violate the privacy information.
  Security of the privacy-related information transmitted through the Internet
  must also be considered.
  To consider privacy and security issues even when disaster occurs,
  IAA cluster handles victim information as an encrypted message in the
  IAA transport mechanism. And to avoid unexpected exploitation of privacy
  information, queries are required to fix the individual victim information. 

* The IAA system must provide accurate information. Personal safety
  information from oneself and indirect information from others should
  be discriminated.
  To provide data accuracy of registered victim information, two types of
  registration format are prepared. One registration format is that for
  oneself and the other is that for other persons situation. IAA cluster
  treats the former information as high accurate data and people who get
  victims' information can easily judge the accuracy of the results.

* The IAA system must provide flexible user interfaces for supporting
  many kinds of people. People may not be familiar with computers or
  there are not enough facilities to register their information in the
  disaster area.

[1] N. Tada, Y. Izawa, M. Kimoto, T. Maruyama, H. Ohno and M. Nakayama,
   "IAA System (``I Am Alive''): The Experiences of the Internet Disaster
    Drills", Proc. of INET2000, ISOC, Jul. 2000.

-- Technology used in IAA system:

Current prototype implementation of the IAA cluster is an user area
application on FreeBSD platform. And IAA cluster uses many standard
software packages to eliminate system dependency.
For example, database component uses PostgreSQL package, web server
portion uses Apache program and IAA transport mechanism uses INN package.
In addition to these packages, Perl scripts are composed to handle
operations of IAA system requirements. User interface programs are
developed separately.
We developed Web client, FAX interface, telephone interface,
windows client and i-mode mobile phone interface for IAA cluster.
Other detailed implementation of transport mechanism and FAX interface
program are  shown in [2,3].

[2] Y. Izawa, S. Ishii, N. Tada and M. Nakayama,
    "Implementation and Evaluation of Widely Distributed Database System
    Using Satellite based Multicast and NetNews System for the Transport
    Mechanism", Proc. of IWS98, IEICE, Mar. 1998.

[3] H. Honma, A. Noda and H. Ohno,
    "An Alternative User Interface for the IAA System: Using OCR/OMR as
    on-ramp Gateway for the Internet", Proc. of IWS98, IEICE, Mar. 1998.

--- L3 requirement for IAA system:

To synchronize victims' information between IAA cluster nodes, TCP/IP
connectivity is necessary. In our experimental system, we have redundant
information exchange paths between IAA cluster nodes.
We don't use any priority based L3 services between IAA cluster nodes.

---- IAA-Alliance
 
There are several implementations of IAA system.  One is developed by
WIDE Project, and one is developed under direction of CRL
(Communications Research Laboratory), other implementations also
exist. And there are many systems which has similar facilities to IAA.
At this point, technical problems are protocol interconnectivity and
meta-data portability. To establish interconnectivity of these systems,
IAA Alliance has organized in 2002.  IAA Alliance may deal with
important roles for establishing a standard with other international
standard bodies.

Thanks for reading this mail through.

-- izawa
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