Transmission and Scheduling Aspects of Distributed Storage and Their Connections with Index Coding

TL;DR

This paper explores how distributed storage sources influence index coding solutions and rates, extending previous work to semi-deterministic MAC channels and highlighting the impact of message distribution and redundancy.

Contribution

It extends the understanding of distributed index coding by analyzing the effects of message distribution and redundancy on achievable rates over MAC channels.

Findings

Message distribution significantly affects index coding rates.

Redundancy across sources can improve achievable rates.

Distributed storage impacts index coding solutions and network design.

Abstract

Index coding is often studied with the assumption that a single source has all the messages requested by the receivers. We refer to this as \emph{centralized} index coding. In contrast, this paper focuses on \emph{distributed} index coding and addresses the following question: How does the availability of messages at distributed sources (storage nodes) affect the solutions and achievable rates of index coding? An extension to the work of Arbabjolfaei et al. in ISIT 2013 is presented when distributed sources communicate via a semi-deterministic multiple access channel (MAC) to simultaneous receivers. A numbers of examples are discussed that show the effect of message distribution and redundancy across the network on achievable rates of index coding and motivate future research on designing practical network storage codes that offer high index coding rates.