Fundamental Limits of Exact-Repair Regenerating Codes

Understanding the fundamental limits of communication systems involves both constructing efficient coding schemes as well as proving mathematically that certain performance is impossible to achieve; the latter is known as the converse problem in information theory. This thesis focused on the converse problems for complex information systems such as self-repair distributed storage and coded caching systems, and our goal was to establish tight converse results for such systems by exploiting problem-specific combinatorial structures. The main part of this thesis dealt with exact-repair regenerating codes, which were first proposed by Dimakis et al. in 2010. In particular, we considered two extensions of the original setting of Dimakis et al., namely 1) multilevel diversity coding with regeneration and 2) secure exact-repair regenerating codes. For the problem of multilevel diversity coding with regeneration, we showed, via the proposed combinatorial approach, that the natural separate encoding strategy can achieve the optimal tradeoff between the normalized storage capacity and repair bandwidth at the minimum-bandwidth rate (MBR) point. This settled a conjecture by Tian and Liu in 2015. For the problem of secure exact-repair regenerating codes, all known results from the literature showed that the achievable tradeoff regions between the normalized storage capacity and repair bandwidth have a single corner point, achieved by a scheme proposed by Shah, Rashmi and Kumar (the SRK point). Since the achievable tradeoff regions of the exact-repair regenerating code problem without any secrecy constraints were known to have multiple corner points in general, these existing results suggested a phase-change-like behavior, i.e., enforcing a secrecy constraint immediately reduces the tradeoff region to one with a single corner point. In our work, we first showed that when the secrecy parameter is sufficiently large, the SRK point is indeed the only corner point of the tradeoff region. However, when the secrecy parameter is small, we showed that the tradeoff region can, in fact, have multiple corner points. In particular, we established a precise characterization of the tradeoff region for a particular problem instance, which has exactly two corner points. Thus, a smooth transition, instead of a phase-change-type of transition, should be expected as the secrecy constraint is gradually strengthened

Multilevel Diversity Coding with Secure Regeneration: Separate Coding Achieves the MBR Point

The problem of multilevel diversity coding with secure regeneration (MDC-SR) is considered, which includes the problems of multilevel diversity coding with regeneration (MDC-R) and secure regenerating code (SRC) as special cases. Two outer bounds are established, showing that separate coding of different messages using the respective SRCs can achieve the minimum-bandwidth-regeneration (MBR) point of the achievable normalized storage-capacity repair-bandwidth tradeoff regions for the general MDC-SR problem. The core of the new converse results is an exchange lemma, which can be established using Han's subset inequality

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

Improving the Secrecy of Distributed Storage Systems using Interference Alignment

Regenerating codes based on the approach of interference alignment for wireless interference channel achieve the cut-set bound for distributed storage systems. These codes provide data reliability, and perform efficient exact node repair when some node fails. Interference alignment as a concept is especially important to improve the repair efficiency of a failed node in a minimum storage regenerating (MSR) code. In addition it can improve the stored data security in presence of passive intruders. In this paper we construct a new code resilient against a threat model where a passive eavesdropper can access the data stored on a subset of nodes and the downloaded data during the repair process of a subset of failed nodes. We achieve an optimal secrecy capacity for the new explicit construction of MSR interference alignment code. Hence, we show that the eavesdropper obtains zero information from the original message stored across the distributed storage, and that we achieve a perfect secrecy.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

On Distributed Storage Codes

Distributed storage systems are studied. The interest in such system has become relatively wide due to the increasing amount of information needed to be stored in data centers or different kinds of cloud systems. There are many kinds of solutions for storing the information into distributed devices regarding the needs of the system designer. This thesis studies the questions of designing such storage systems and also fundamental limits of such systems. Namely, the subjects of interest of this thesis include heterogeneous distributed storage systems, distributed storage systems with the exact repair property, and locally repairable codes. For distributed storage systems with either functional or exact repair, capacity results are proved. In the case of locally repairable codes, the minimum distance is studied. Constructions for exact-repairing codes between minimum bandwidth regeneration (MBR) and minimum storage regeneration (MSR) points are given. These codes exceed the time-sharing line of the extremal points in many cases. Other properties of exact-regenerating codes are also studied. For the heterogeneous setup, the main result is that the capacity of such systems is always smaller than or equal to the capacity of a homogeneous system with symmetric repair with average node size and average repair bandwidth. A randomized construction for a locally repairable code with good minimum distance is given. It is shown that a random linear code of certain natural type has a good minimum distance with high probability. Other properties of locally repairable codes are also studied.Siirretty Doriast