Optimal locally repairable codes of distance 33 and 44 via cyclic codes

Like classical block codes, a locally repairable code also obeys the Singleton-type bound (we call a locally repairable code {\it optimal} if it achieves the Singleton-type bound). In the breakthrough work of \cite{TB14}, several classes of optimal locally repairable codes were constructed via subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes. Thus, the lengths of the codes given in \cite{TB14} are upper bounded by the code alphabet size $q$. Recently, it was proved through extension of construction in \cite{TB14} that length of $q$-ary optimal locally repairable codes can be $q+1$ in \cite{JMX17}. Surprisingly, \cite{BHHMV16} presented a few examples of $q$-ary optimal locally repairable codes of small distance and locality with code length achieving roughly $q^2$. Very recently, it was further shown in \cite{LMX17} that there exist $q$-ary optimal locally repairable codes with length bigger than $q+1$ and distance propositional to $n$. Thus, it becomes an interesting and challenging problem to construct new families of $q$-ary optimal locally repairable codes of length bigger than $q+1$. In this paper, we construct a class of optimal locally repairable codes of distance $3$ and $4$ with unbounded length (i.e., length of the codes is independent of the code alphabet size). Our technique is through cyclic codes with particular generator and parity-check polynomials that are carefully chosen

New constructions of optimal (r,δ)(r,\delta)-LRCs via good polynomials

Locally repairable codes (LRCs) are a class of erasure codes that are widely used in distributed storage systems, which allow for efficient recovery of data in the case of node failures or data loss. In 2014, Tamo and Barg introduced Reed-Solomon-like (RS-like) Singleton-optimal $(r,\delta)$-LRCs based on polynomial evaluation. These constructions rely on the existence of so-called good polynomial that is constant on each of some pairwise disjoint subsets of $\mathbb{F}_q$. In this paper, we extend the aforementioned constructions of RS-like LRCs and proposed new constructions of $(r,\delta)$-LRCs whose code length can be larger. These new $(r,\delta)$-LRCs are all distance-optimal, namely, they attain an upper bound on the minimum distance, that will be established in this paper. This bound is sharper than the Singleton-type bound in some cases owing to the extra conditions, it coincides with the Singleton-type bound for certain cases. Combing these constructions with known explicit good polynomials of special forms, we can get various explicit Singleton-optimal $(r,\delta)$-LRCs with new parameters, whose code lengths are all larger than that constructed by the RS-like $(r,\delta)$-LRCs introduced by Tamo and Barg. Note that the code length of classical RS codes and RS-like LRCs are both bounded by the field size. We explicitly construct the Singleton-optimal $(r,\delta)$-LRCs with length $n=q-1+\delta$ for any positive integers $r,\delta\geq 2$ and $(r+\delta-1)\mid (q-1)$. When $\delta$ is proportional to $q$, it is asymptotically longer than that constructed via elliptic curves whose length is at most $q+2\sqrt{q}$. Besides, it allows more flexibility on the values of $r$ and $\delta$

How long can optimal locally repairable codes be?

A locally repairable code (LRC) with locality r allows for the recovery of any erased codeword symbol using only r other codeword symbols. A Singleton-type bound dictates the best possible trade-off between the dimension and distance of LRCs - an LRC attaining this trade-off is deemed optimal. Such optimal LRCs have been constructed over alphabets growing linearly in the block length. Unlike the classical Singleton bound, however, it was not known if such a linear growth in the alphabet size is necessary, or for that matter even if the alphabet needs to grow at all with the block length. Indeed, for small code distances 3,4, arbitrarily long optimal LRCs were known over fixed alphabets. Here, we prove that for distances d >=slant 5, the code length n of an optimal LRC over an alphabet of size q must be at most roughly O(d q^3). For the case d=5, our upper bound is O(q^2). We complement these bounds by showing the existence of optimal LRCs of length Omega_{d,r}(q^{1+1/floor[(d-3)/2]}) when d <=slant r+2. Our bounds match when d=5, pinning down n=Theta(q^2) as the asymptotically largest length of an optimal LRC for this case