Explicit Construction of Minimum Bandwidth Rack-Aware Regenerating Codes

Abstract: In large data centers, storage nodes are organized in racks, and the cross-rack transmission dominates the bandwidth cost. For the repair of single node failures, codes achieving the tradeoff between the storage redundancy and cross-rack repair bandwidth are called rack-aware regenerating codes (RRCs). In this work, we give the first explicit construction of RRCs with the minimum repair bandwidth (i.e., the cross-rack bandwidth equals the storage size per node). Our construction applies to all admissible parameters and has the lowest sub-packetization level. Moreover, the underlying finite fields are of size comparable to the number of storage nodes, which makes our codes more implementable in practice. Finally, for the convenience of practical use, we also establish a transformation to convert our codes into systematic codes.