Hierarchical Hybrid Error Correction for Time-Sensitive Devices at the Edge

Abstract: Computational storage, known as a solution to significantly reduce the latency by moving data-processing down to the data storage, has received wide attention because of its potential to accelerate data-driven devices at the edge. To meet the insatiable appetite for complicated functionalities tailored for intelligent devices such as autonomous vehicles, properties including heterogeneity, scalability, and flexibility are becoming increasingly important. Based on our prior work on hierarchical erasure coding that enables scalability and flexibility in cloud storage, we develop an efficient decoding algorithm that corrects a mixture of errors and erasures simultaneously. We first extract the basic component code, the so-called extended Cauchy (EC) codes, of the proposed coding solution. We prove that the class of EC codes is strictly larger than that of relevant codes with known explicit decoding algorithms. Motivated by this finding, we then develop an efficient decoding method for the general class of EC codes, based on which we propose the local and global decoding algorithms for the hierarchical codes. Our proposed hybrid error correction not only enables the usage of hierarchical codes in computational storage at the edge, but also applies to any Cauchy-like codes and allows potentially wider applications of the EC codes.