Multilevel Diversity Coding With Regeneration

Digital contents distributed storage systems may have different reliability and access delay requirements, and erasure codes with different strengths can provide the best storage efficiency in these systems. At the same time, in such large-scale distributed storage systems, nodes fail on a regular basis, and the contents stored on them need to be regenerated from the data downloaded from the remaining nodes. The efficiency of this repair process is an important factor that affects the overall quality of service. In this paper, we formulate the problem of multilevel diversity coding with regeneration to address these considerations, for which the storage versus repair-bandwidth tradeoff is investigated. We show that the extreme point on the optimal tradeoff curve that corresponds to the minimum possible storage can be achieved by a simple coding scheme, in which contents with different reliability requirements are encoded separately with individual regenerating codes without any mixing. On the other hand, we establish the complete storage-repair-bandwidth tradeoff for the case of four storage nodes, which reveals that codes mixing different contents can, in general, strictly improve the optimal tradeoff over the separate-coding solution.