Fundamental Limits of Erasure-Coded Key-Value Stores with Side Information

Abstract: In applications of distributed storage systems to modern key-value stores, the stored data is highly dynamic due to frequent updates. The multi-version coding problem was formulated to study the cost of storing dynamic data in distributed storage systems. Previous work on multi-version coding considered a completely decentralized and asynchronous system assuming that the servers are not aware of which versions of the data are received by the other servers. In this paper, we relax this assumption and study a system where a server may acquire side information of the data versions propagated to some other servers based on the network topology. Specifically, we study a storage system with $n$ servers over a directed graph that store $\nu$ totally ordered versions of a message. Each server receives a subset of these $\nu$ versions. A server is aware of which versions have been received by its neighbors in the network graph. We show that the side information can result in a better storage cost as compared with the case where there is no side information for some regimes at the expense of the additional latency associated with exchanging the side information. Through an information-theoretic converse, we identify surprising scenarios where the side information may not help in improving the worst-case storage cost beyond the case where servers have no side information. Finally, we present a case study over Amazon web services (AWS) that demonstrates the potential cost reductions that may be obtained by our constructions.