Practical Considerations in Repairing Reed-Solomon Codes

Abstract

The issue of repairing Reed-Solomon codes currently employed in industry has been sporadically discussed in the literature. In this work we carry out a systematic study of these codes and investigate important aspects of repairing them under the trace repair framework, including which evaluation points to select and how to implement a trace repair scheme efficiently. In particular, we employ different heuristic algorithms to search for low-bandwidth repair schemes for codes of short lengths with typical redundancies and establish three tables of current best repair schemes for $[n,k]$ Reed-Solomon codes over GF(256) with $4\le n\le 16$ and $r=n-k\in \{2,3,4\}$. The tables cover most known codes currently used in the distributed storage industry.

6 pages, accepted to the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory