Optimal Repair of $(k+2, k, 2)$ MDS Array Codes

Abstract: Maximum distance separable (MDS) codes are widely used in distributed storage systems as they provide optimal fault tolerance for a given amount of storage overhead. The seminal work of Dimakis~\emph{et al.} first established a lower bound on the repair bandwidth for a single failed node of MDS codes, known as the \emph{cut-set bound}. MDS codes that achieve this bound are called minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes. Numerous constructions and theoretical analyses of MSR codes reveal that they typically require exponentially large sub-packetization levels, leading to significant disk I/O overhead. To mitigate this issue, many studies explore the trade-offs between the sub-packetization level and repair bandwidth, achieving reduced sub-packetization at the cost of suboptimal repair bandwidth. Despite these advances, the fundamental question of determining the minimum repair bandwidth for a single failure of MDS codes with fixed sub-packetization remains open. In this paper, we address this challenge for the case of two parity nodes ($n-k=2$) and sub-packetization $\ell=2$. We derive tight lower bounds on both the minimum repair bandwidth and the minimum I/O overhead. Furthermore, we present two explicit MDS array code constructions that achieve these bounds, respectively, offering practical code designs with provable repair efficiency.