HFR Code: A Flexible Replication Scheme for Cloud Storage Systems

Fractional repetition (FR) codes are a family of repair-efficient storage codes that provide exact and uncoded node repair at the minimum bandwidth regenerating point. The advantageous repair properties are achieved by a tailor-made two-layer encoding scheme which concatenates an outer maximum-distance-separable (MDS) code and an inner repetition code. In this paper, we generalize the application of FR codes and propose heterogeneous fractional repetition (HFR) code, which is adaptable to the scenario where the repetition degrees of coded packets are different. We provide explicit code constructions by utilizing group divisible designs, which allow the design of HFR codes over a large range of parameters. The constructed codes achieve the system storage capacity under random access repair and have multiple repair alternatives for node failures. Further, we take advantage of the systematic feature of MDS codes and present a novel design framework of HFR codes, in which storage nodes can be wisely partitioned into clusters such that data reconstruction time can be reduced when contacting nodes in the same cluster.Comment: Accepted for publication in IET Communications, Jul. 201

Load-Balanced Fractional Repetition Codes

We introduce load-balanced fractional repetition (LBFR) codes, which are a strengthening of fractional repetition (FR) codes. LBFR codes have the additional property that multiple node failures can be sequentially repaired by downloading no more than one block from any other node. This allows for better use of the network, and can additionally reduce the number of disk reads necessary to repair multiple nodes. We characterize LBFR codes in terms of their adjacency graphs, and use this characterization to present explicit constructions LBFR codes with storage capacity comparable existing FR codes. Surprisingly, in some parameter regimes, our constructions of LBFR codes match the parameters of the best constructions of FR codes

Private Information Retrieval in Graph-Based Replication Systems

In a Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol, a user can download a file from a database without revealing the identity of the file to each individual server. A PIR protocol is called t-private if the identity of the file remains concealed even if t of the servers collude. Graph based replication is a simple technique, which is prevalent in both theory and practice, for achieving robustness in storage systems. In this technique each file is replicated on two or more storage servers, giving rise to a (hyper-)graph structure. In this paper we study private information retrieval protocols in graph based replication systems. The main interest of this work is understanding the collusion structures which emerge in the underlying graph. Our main contribution is a 2-replication scheme which guarantees perfect privacy from acyclic sets in the graph, and guarantees partial-privacy in the presence of cycles. Furthermore, by providing an upper bound, it is shown that the PIR rate of this scheme is at most a factor of two from its optimal value for regular graphs. Lastly, we extend our results to larger replication factors and to graph-based coding, a generalization of graph based replication that induces smaller storage overhead and larger PIR rate in many cases