Reducing repair traffic for erasure coding-based storage via interference alignment

Abstract

We consider the problem of recovering from a single node failure in a storage system based on an (n, k) MDS code. In such a scenario, a straightforward solution is to perform a complete decoding, even though the data to be recovered only amount to 1/kth of the entire data. This paper presents techniques that can reduce the network traffic incurred. The techniques perform algebraic alignment so that the effective dimension of unwanted information is reduced.