2011/07/15 by Frédérique Oggier, Frederique Oggier, Anwitaman Datta +2
Computer Science · #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Caching and Content Delivery #Distributed #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) #cs.DC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1107.3129
arXiv admin note: significant text overlap with arXiv:1008.0064
arxiv created 2011/07/15 · openalex publication_date 2011/07/15 · arxiv updated 2011/12/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Distributed data storage systems are essential to deal with the need to store massive volumes of data. In order to make such a system fault-tolerant, some form of redundancy becomes crucial, incurring various overheads - most prominently in terms of storage space and maintenance bandwidth requirements. Erasure codes, originally designed for communication over lossy channels, provide a storage efficient alternative to replication based redundancy, however entailing high communication overhead for maintenance, when some of the encoded fragments need to be replenished in news ones after failure of some storage devices. We propose as an alternative a new family of erasure codes called self-repairing codes (SRC) taking into account the peculiarities of distributed storage systems, specifically the maintenance process. SRC has the following salient features: (a) encoded fragments can be repaired directly from other subsets of encoded fragments by downloading less data than the size of the complete object, ensuring that (b) a fragment is repaired from a fixed number of encoded fragments, the number depending only on how many encoded blocks are missing and independent of which specific blocks are missing. This paper lays the foundations by defining the novel self-repairing codes, elaborating why the defined characteristics are desirable for distributed storage systems. Then homomorphic self-repairing codes (HSRC) are proposed as a concrete instance, whose various aspects and properties are studied and compared - quantitatively or qualitatively with respect to other codes including traditional erasure codes as well as other recent codes designed specifically for storage applications.