Two Piggybacking Codes with Flexible Sub-Packetization to Achieve Lower Repair Bandwidth

Abstract: As a special class of array codes, $(n,k,m)$ piggybacking codes are MDS codes (i.e., any $k$ out of $n$ nodes can retrieve all data symbols) that can achieve low repair bandwidth for single-node failure with low sub-packetization $m$. In this paper, we propose two new piggybacking codes that have lower repair bandwidth than the existing piggybacking codes given the same parameters. Our first piggybacking codes can support flexible sub-packetization $m$ with $2\leq m\leq n-k$, where $n - k > 3$. We show that our first piggybacking codes have lower repair bandwidth for any single-node failure than the existing piggybacking codes when $n - k = 8,9$, $m = 6$ and $30\leq k \leq 100$. Moreover, we propose second piggybacking codes such that the sub-packetization is a multiple of the number of parity nodes (i.e., $(n-k)|m$), by jointly designing the piggyback function for data node repair and transformation function for parity node repair. We show that the proposed second piggybacking codes have lowest repair bandwidth for any single-node failure among all the existing piggybacking codes for the evaluated parameters $k/n = 0.75, 0.8, 0.9$ and $n-k\geq 4$.