Exact-Repair Codes With Partial Collaboration in Distributed Storage Systems

The partially collaborative repair of multiple node failures in distributed storage systems is investigated. An exact-repair code is constructed using a bilinear form, which achieves the minimum-bandwidth partially collaborative repair (MBPCR) point. When the storage capacity is minimum, the problem of repairing multi-node failures using a Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) array code is also investigated. The minimum-storage partially collaborative repair (MSPCR) problem with same number of repairing and reconstruction nodes has been studied before. In this paper, the scenario where the number of repairing nodes is greater than that of reconstruction nodes and the storage capacity is already minimal for partial collaboration is considered. An MDS array code is constructed, which asymptotically achieves the MSPCR point. Further, we show that the given code construction could not always have a regular collaborative structure.