Centralized Multi-Node Repair Regenerating Codes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the fundamental tradeoffs in repairing multiple node failures in distributed storage, proposing optimal strategies, code conversions, and proving limitations for exact repair scenarios.

Contribution

It establishes the tradeoff between repair bandwidth and storage for multi-node failures, derives closed-form solutions, and introduces a framework for converting single failure codes to multi-node repair codes.

Findings

Optimal tradeoff between repair bandwidth and storage size identified.

Framework for converting single erasure codes to multi-node repair codes proposed.

Functional MBMR point is not achievable for linear exact repair codes.

Abstract

In a distributed storage system, recovering from multiple failures is a critical and frequent task that is crucial for maintaining the system's reliability and fault-tolerance. In this work, we focus on the problem of repairing multiple failures in a centralized way, which can be desirable in many data storage configurations, and we show that a significant repair traffic reduction is possible. First, the fundamental tradeoff between the repair bandwidth and the storage size for functional repair is established. Using a graph-theoretic formulation, the optimal tradeoff is identified as the solution to an integer optimization problem, for which a closed-form expression is derived. Expressions of the extreme points, namely the minimum storage multi-node repair (MSMR) and minimum bandwidth multi-node repair (MBMR) points, are obtained. Second, we describe a general framework for converting single erasure minimum storage regenerating codes to MSMR codes. The repair strategy for $e$ failures is similar to that for single failure, however certain extra requirements need to be satisfied by the repairing functions for single failure. For illustration, the framework is applied to product-matrix codes and interference alignment codes. Furthermore, we prove that the functional MBMR point is not achievable for linear exact repair codes. We also show that exact-repair minimum bandwidth cooperative repair (MBCR) codes achieve an interior point, that lies near the MBMR point, when $k \equiv 1 \mod e$, $k$ being the minimum number of nodes needed to reconstruct the entire data. Finally, for $k> 2e, e\mid k$ and $e \mid d$, where $d$ is the number of helper nodes during repair, we show that the functional repair tradeoff is not achievable under exact repair, except for maybe a small portion near the MSMR point, which parallels the results for single erasure repair by Shah et al.