The Repair Problem for Reed–Solomon Codes: Optimal Repair of Single and Multiple Erasures With Almost Optimal Node Size

The repair problem in distributed storage addresses recovery of the data encoded using an erasure code, for instance, a Reed-Solomon (RS) code. We consider the problem of repairing a single node or multiple nodes in RS-coded storage systems using the smallest possible amount of inter-nodal communication. According to the cut-set bound, communication cost of repairing h ≥ 1 failed nodes for an (n, k = n - r) maximum distance separable (MDS) code using d helper nodes is at least dhl/(d + h - k), where l is the size of the node. Guruswami and Wootters (2016) initiated the study of efficient repair of RS codes, showing that they can be repaired using a smaller bandwidth than under the trivial approach. At the same time, their work as well as follow-up papers stopped short of constructing RS codes (or any scalar MDS codes) that meet the cut-set bound with equality. In this paper, we construct the families of RS codes that achieve the cut-set bound for repair of one or several nodes. In the single-node case, we present the RS codes of length n over the field F(q
^l
), l = exp((1 + o(1))n logn) that meet the cut-set bound. We also prove an almost matching lower bound on l, showing that super-exponential scaling is both necessary and sufficient for scalar MDS codes to achieve the cut-set bound using linear repair schemes. For the case of multiple nodes, we construct a family of RS codes that achieve the cut-set bound universally for the repair of any h = 1,2, . . ., r failed nodes from any subset of d helper nodes, k ≤ d ≤ n - h. For a fixed number of parities r, the node size of the constructed codes is close to the smallest possible node size for codes with such properties.