A Family of MDS Array Codes with Minimal Number of Encoding Operations

In P. Corbett et a. (2004), the authors present a row-diagonal parity scheme with two parity columns for a (p - 1) times (p + 1) array, p a prime, that recovers any two erased columns. The code minimizes the number of XORs at the encoding. It was left as an open problem generalizing this scheme to multiple parities. In this paper, we present such a generalization. In particular, when we have three parity columns, the new code recovers any three erased columns. Efficient encoding and decoding algorithms are presented