Update-Efficient Regenerating Codes with Minimum Per-Node Storage

Abstract: Regenerating codes provide an efficient way to recover data at failed nodes in distributed storage systems. It has been shown that regenerating codes can be designed to minimize the per-node storage (called MSR) or minimize the communication overhead for regeneration (called MBR). In this work, we propose a new encoding scheme for [n,d] error- correcting MSR codes that generalizes our earlier work on error-correcting regenerating codes. We show that by choosing a suitable diagonal matrix, any generator matrix of the [n,{\alpha}] Reed-Solomon (RS) code can be integrated into the encoding matrix. Hence, MSR codes with the least update complexity can be found. An efficient decoding scheme is also proposed that utilizes the [n,{\alpha}] RS code to perform data reconstruction. The proposed decoding scheme has better error correction capability and incurs the least number of node accesses when errors are present.