This paper considers a distributed storage system, where multiple storage nodes can be reconstructed simultaneously at a centralized location. This centralized multi-node repair (CMR) model is a generalization of regenerating codes that allow for bandwidth-efficient repair of a single failed node. This work focuses on the trade-off between the amount of data stored and repair bandwidth in this CMR model. In particular, repair bandwidth bounds are derived for the minimum storage multi-node repair (MSMR) and the minimum bandwidth multi-node repair (MBMR) operating points. The tightness of these bounds are analyzed via code constructions. The MSMR point is characterized through codes achieving this point under functional repair for general set of CMR parameters, as well as with codes enabling exact repair for certain CMR parameters. The MBMR point, on the other hand, is characterized with exact repair codes for all CMR parameters for systems that satisfy a certain entropy accumulation property. Finally, the model proposed here is utilized for the secret sharing problem, where the codes for the multi-node repair problem is used to construct communication efficient secret sharing schemes with the property of bandwidth efficient share repair.
@cite_12: The high repair bandwidth cost of (n,k) maximum distance separable (MDS) erasure codes has motivated a new class of codes that can reduce repair bandwidth over that of conventional MDS codes. In this paper, we address (n,k,d) exact repair MDS codes, which allow for any single failed node to be repaired exactly with access to any arbitrary set of d survivor nodes. We show the existence of exact repair MDS codes that achieve minimum repair bandwidth (matching the cut-set lower bound) for arbitrary admissible (n,k,d), i.e., k ≤ d ≤ n-1. Moreover, we extend our results to show the optimality of our codes for multiple-node failure scenarios in which an arbitrary set of r ≤ n-k failed nodes needs to repaired. Our approach is based on asymptotic interference alignment proposed by Cadambe and Jafar. As a byproduct, we also characterize the capacity of a class of multisource nonmulticast networks.
The problem of centralized bandwidth-efficient repair of multiple node failures in a DSS employing has previously been considered by @cite_12 . However, they restrict themselves to only MDS codes and they show existence of such codes only in the asymptotic regime where node size (amount of data stored on a node) tends to infinity.