Repairing Reed-Solomon Codes With Two Erasures

TL;DR

This paper extends a recent method for Reed-Solomon code repair to efficiently handle two erasures, improving repair bandwidth in distributed storage systems.

Contribution

It introduces an extension of Guruswami and Wootters' trace collection technique to repair two erasures in Reed-Solomon codes, achieving optimal repair bandwidth.

Findings

Extended repair method for two erasures

Achieved optimal repair bandwidth for two erasures

Enhanced applicability of RS codes in distributed storage

Abstract

Despite their exceptional error-correcting properties, Reed-Solomon (RS) codes have been overlooked in distributed storage applications due to the common belief that they have poor repair bandwidth: A naive repair approach would require the whole file to be reconstructed in order to recover a single erased codeword symbol. In a recent work, Guruswami and Wootters (STOC'16) proposed a single-erasure repair method for RS codes that achieves the optimal repair bandwidth amongst all linear encoding schemes. We extend their trace collection technique to cope with two erasures.