High-Rate Regenerating Codes Through Layering

In this paper, we provide explicit constructions for a class of exact-repair regenerating codes that possess a layered structure. These regenerating codes correspond to interior points on the storage-repair-bandwidth tradeoff, and compare very well in comparison to scheme that employs space-sharing between MSR and MBR codes. For the parameter set $(n,k,d=k)$ with $n < 2k-1$, we construct a class of codes with an auxiliary parameter $w$, referred to as canonical codes. With $w$ in the range $n-k < w < k$, these codes operate in the region between the MSR point and the MBR point, and perform significantly better than the space-sharing line. They only require a field size greater than $w+n-k$. For the case of $(n,n-1,n-1)$, canonical codes can also be shown to achieve an interior point on the line-segment joining the MSR point and the next point of slope-discontinuity on the storage-repair-bandwidth tradeoff. Thus we establish the existence of exact-repair codes on a point other than the MSR and the MBR point on the storage-repair-bandwidth tradeoff. We also construct layered regenerating codes for general parameter set $(n,k<d,k)$, which we refer to as non-canonical codes. These codes also perform significantly better than the space-sharing line, though they require a significantly higher field size. All the codes constructed in this paper are high-rate, can repair multiple node-failures and do not require any computation at the helper nodes. We also construct optimal codes with locality in which the local codes are layered regenerating codes.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure

Error Resilience in Distributed Storage via Rank-Metric Codes

This paper presents a novel coding scheme for distributed storage systems containing nodes with adversarial errors. The key challenge in such systems is the propagation of erroneous data from a single corrupted node to the rest of the system during a node repair process. This paper presents a concatenated coding scheme which is based on two types of codes: maximum rank distance (MRD) code as an outer code and optimal repair maximal distance separable (MDS) array code as an inner code. Given this, two different types of adversarial errors are considered: the first type considers an adversary that can replace the content of an affected node only once; while the second attack-type considers an adversary that can pollute data an unbounded number of times. This paper proves that the proposed coding scheme attains a suitable upper bound on resilience capacity for the first type of error. Further, the paper presents mechanisms that combine this code with subspace signatures to achieve error resilience for the second type of errors. Finally, the paper concludes by presenting a construction based on MRD codes for optimal locally repairable scalar codes that can tolerate adversarial errors