Design and Implementation of iATA on Windows CE Platform: An ATA-Based Virtual Storage System

The storage limitation in mobile appliance has become a significant problem due to the rapid growth of data-centric application. To alleviate the above problem, we developed a new block-level storage network protocol, iATA (Internet advanced technology attachment) as a transport for carrying ATA block-level access protocol over the ubiquitous TCP/IP network. With iATA, mobile user is able to access their valuable data natively through the network from anywhere and at anytime as if the storage device is attached locally. In this paper, we describe concepts, design, and operations of iATA protocol. We also demonstrate the feasibility experiment by implementing iATA protocol on Windows based mobile operating platform. The result of our implementation shows that the iATA protocol is feasible to be applied on Windows CE platform device.