Multilevel Diversity Coding with Regeneration

TL;DR

This paper investigates the tradeoff between storage efficiency and repair bandwidth in distributed storage systems with multilevel reliability requirements, proposing simple separate coding schemes and analyzing the benefits of content mixing.

Contribution

It formulates the multilevel diversity coding with regeneration problem, characterizes the optimal tradeoff for four nodes, and shows mixing contents can improve performance.

Findings

Separate coding achieves minimal storage point.

Mixing contents improves the overall tradeoff.

Complete tradeoff characterized for four nodes.

Abstract

Digital contents in large scale distributed storage systems may have different reliability and access delay requirements, and for this reason, erasure codes with different strengths need to be utilized to achieve the best storage efficiency. At the same time, in such large scale distributed storage systems, nodes fail on a regular basis, and the contents stored on them need to be regenerated and stored on other healthy nodes, the efficiency of which is an important factor affecting the overall quality of service. In this work, we formulate the problem of multilevel diversity coding with regeneration to address these considerations, for which the storage vs. repair-bandwidth tradeoff is investigated. We show that the extreme point on this tradeoff corresponding to the minimum possible storage can be achieved by a simple coding scheme, where contents with different reliability requirements are encoded separately with individual regenerating codes without any mixing. On the other hand, we establish the complete storage-repair-bandwidth tradeoff for the case of four storage nodes, which reveals that codes mixing different contents can strictly improve this tradeoff over the separate coding solution.