Cascade Codes for Distributed Storage Systems

A novel coding scheme for exact repair-regenerating codes is presented in this paper. The codes proposed in this work can trade between the repair bandwidth of nodes (number of downloaded symbols from each surviving node in a repair process) and the required storage overhead of the system. These codes work for general system parameters (n,k,d), which are the total number of nodes, the number of nodes suffice for data recovery, and the number of helper nodes in a repair process, respectively. The proposed construction offers a unified scheme to develop exact-repair regenerating codes for the entire trade-off, including the MBR and MSR points. We conjecture that the new storage-vs.-bandwidth trade-off achieved by the proposed codes is optimum. Some other key features of this code include: the construction is linear; the required field size is only Theta(n); and the code parameters and in particular sub-packetization level is at most (d - k + 1)(k); which is independent of the number of the parity nodes. Moreover, the proposed repair mechanism is helper-independent, that is the data sent from each helper only depends on the identity of the helper and failed nodes, but independent of the identity of other helper nodes participating in the repair process.