We study the fundamental trade-off between storage and content download time.
We show that the download time can be significantly reduced by dividing the
content into chunks, encoding it to add redundancy and then distributing it
across multiple disks. We determine the download time for two content access
models - the fountain and fork-join models that involve simultaneous content
access, and individual access from enqueued user requests respectively. For the
fountain model we explicitly characterize the download time, while in the
fork-join model we derive the upper and lower bounds. Our results show that
coding reduces download time, through the diversity of distributing the data
across more disks, even for the total storage used.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conferenc
