In this paper, a new repair scheme for a modified construction of MDS codes is studied. The obtained repair scheme has optimal bandwidth for multiple failed nodes under the cooperative repair model. In addition, the repair scheme has relatively low access property, where the number of data accessed is less than two times the optimal value.
Regenerating codes enable trading off repair bandwidth for storage in distributed storage systems (DSS). Due to their distributed nature, these systems are intrinsically susceptible to attacks, and they may also be subject to multiple simultaneous node failures. Cooperative regenerating codes allow bandwidth efficient repair of multiple simultaneous node failures. This paper analyzes storage systems that employ cooperative regenerating codes that are robust to (passive) eavesdroppers. The analysis is divided into two parts, studying both minimum bandwidth and minimum storage cooperative regene…
In distributed storage systems, cooperative regenerating codes tradeoff storage for repair bandwidth in the case of multiple node failures. In rack-aware distributed storage systems, there is no cost associated with transferring symbols within a rack. Hence, the repair bandwidth will only take into account cross-rack transfer. Rack-aware regenerating codes for the case of single node failures have been studied and their repair bandwidth tradeoff characterized. In this paper, we consider the framework of rack-aware cooperative regenerating codes for the case of multiple node failures where the …
One of the design objectives in distributed storage system is the minimization of the data traffic during the repair of failed storage nodes. By repairing multiple failures simultaneously and cooperatively, further reduction of repair traffic is made possible. A closed-form expression of the optimal tradeoff between the repair traffic and the amount of storage in each node for cooperative repair is given. We show that the points on the tradeoff curve can be achieved by linear cooperative regenerating codes, with an explicit bound on the required finite field size. The proof relies on a max-flo…
The newly presented $(k+2,k)$ Hadamard minimum storage regenerating (MSR) code is the first class of high rate storage code with optimal repair property for all single node failures. In this paper, we propose a new simple repair strategy, which can considerably reduces the computation load of the node repair in contrast to the original one.
We give an explicit construction of exact cooperative regenerating codes at the MBCR (minimum bandwidth cooperative regeneration) point. Before the paper, the only known explicit MBCR code is given with parameters $n=d+r$ and $d=k$, while our construction applies to all possible values of $n,k,d,r$. The code has a brief expression in the polynomial form and the data reconstruction is accomplished by bivariate polynomial interpolation. It is a scalar code and operates over a finite field of size $q\geq n$. Besides, we establish several subspace properties for linear exact MBCR codes. Based on t…
When there are multiple node failures in a distributed storage system, regenerating the failed storage nodes individually in a one-by-one manner is suboptimal as far as repair-bandwidth minimization is concerned. If data exchange among the newcomers is enabled, we can get a better tradeoff between repair bandwidth and the storage per node. An explicit and optimal construction of cooperative regenerating code is illustrated.
To recover simultaneous multiple failures in erasure coded storage systems, Patrick Lee et al introduce concurrent repair based minimal storage regenerating codes to reduce repair traffic. The architecture of this approach is simpler and more practical than that of the cooperative mechanism in non-fully distributed environment, hence this paper unifies such class of regenerating codes as concurrent regenerating codes and further studies its characteristics by analyzing cut-based information flow graph in the multiple-node recovery model. We present a general storage-bandwidth tradeoff and give…
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) schemes allow a user to retrieve a record from the server without revealing any information on which record is being downloaded. In this paper, we consider PIR schemes where the database is stored using Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) codes which is a class of optimal regenerating codes providing efficient repair when a node failure occurs in the system. We analyse the relationship between the costs of privacy, storage and repair, and also construct an explicit PIR scheme that uses the MSR codes from [3] to achieve the optimal curve of the trade-off.
Regenerating codes allow distributed storage systems to recover from the loss of a storage node while transmitting the minimum possible amount of data across the network. We present a systematic computer search for optimal systematic regenerating codes. To search the space of potential codes, we reduce the potential search space in several ways. We impose an additional symmetry condition on codes that we consider. We specify codes in a simple alternative way, using additional recovered coefficients rather than transmission coefficients and place codes into equivalence classes to avoid redundan…
Heterogeneous Distributed Storage Systems (DSS) are close to real world applications for data storage. Internet caching system and peer-to-peer storage clouds are the examples of such DSS. In this work, we calculate the capacity formula for such systems where each node store different number of packets and each having a different repair bandwidth (node can be repaired by contacting a specific set of nodes). The tradeoff curve between storage and repair bandwidth is studied for such heterogeneous DSS. By analyzing the capacity formula new minimum bandwidth regenerating (MBR) and minimum storage…
In this paper, we consider the setting of exact repair linear regenerating codes. Under this setting, we derive a new outer bound on the storage-repair-bandwidth trade-off for the case when $d = k = n -1$, where $(n, k, d)$ are parameters of the regenerating code, with their usual meaning. Taken together with the achievability result of Tian et. al. [1], we show that the new outer bound derived here completely characterizes the trade-off for the case of exact repair linear regenerating codes, when $d = k = n -1$. The new outer bound is derived by analyzing the dual code of the linear regenerat…
In coding for distributed storage systems, efficient data reconstruction and repair through accessing a predefined number of arbitrarily chosen storage nodes is guaranteed by regenerating codes. Traditionally, code parameters, specially the number of helper nodes participating in a repair process, are predetermined. However, depending on the state of the system and network traffic, it is desirable to adapt such parameters accordingly in order to minimize the cost of repair. In this work a class of regenerating codes with minimum storage is introduced that can simultaneously operate at the opti…
Modern distributed storage systems apply redundancy coding techniques to stored data. One form of redundancy is based on regenerating codes, which can minimize the repair bandwidth, i.e., the amount of data transferred when repairing a failed storage node. Existing regenerating codes mainly require surviving storage nodes encode data during repair. In this paper, we study functional minimum storage regenerating (FMSR) codes, which enable uncoded repair without the encoding requirement in surviving nodes, while preserving the minimum repair bandwidth guarantees and also minimizing disk reads. U…
In this paper we establish an improved outer bound on the storage-repair-bandwidth tradeoff of regenerating codes under exact repair. The result shows that in particular, it is not possible to construct exact-repair regenerating codes that asymptotically achieve the tradeoff that holds for functional repair. While this had been shown earlier by Tian for the special case of $[n,k,d]=[4,3,3]$ the present result holds for general $[n,k,d]$. The new outer bound is obtained by building on the framework established earlier by Shah et al.
In order to provide high data reliability, distributed storage systems disperse data with redundancy to multiple storage nodes. Regenerating codes is a new class of erasure codes to introduce redundancy for the purpose of improving the data repair performance in distributed storage. Most of the studies on regenerating codes focus on the single-failure recovery, but it is not uncommon to see two or more node failures at the same time in large storage networks. To exploit the opportunity of repairing multiple failed nodes simultaneously, a cooperative repair mechanism, in the sense that the node…
Erasure coding techniques are used to increase the reliability of distributed storage systems while minimizing storage overhead. Also of interest is minimization of the bandwidth required to repair the system following a node failure. In a recent paper, Wu et al. characterize the tradeoff between the repair bandwidth and the amount of data stored per node. They also prove the existence of regenerating codes that achieve this tradeoff. In this paper, we introduce Exact Regenerating Codes, which are regenerating codes possessing the additional property of being able to duplicate the data stored …
In this paper, we present a generic framework for constructing systematic minimum storage regenerating codes with two parity nodes based on the invariant subspace technique. Codes constructed in our framework not only contain some best known codes as special cases, but also include some new codes with key properties such as the optimal access property and the optimal update property. In particular, for a given storage capacity of an individual node, one of the new codes has the largest number of systematic nodes and two of the new codes have the largest number of systematic nodes with the opti…
We consider the problem of secure distributed data storage under the paradigm of \emph{weak security}, in which no \emph{meaningful information} is leaked to the eavesdropper. More specifically, the eavesdropper cannot get any information about any individual message file or a small group of files. The key benefit of the weak security paradigm is that it incurs no loss in the storage capacity, which makes it practically appealing. In this paper, we present a coding scheme, using a coset coding based outer code and a Product-Matrix Minimum Bandwidth Regenerating code (proposed by Rashmi et al.)…
Piggybacking is an efficient method to decrease the repair bandwidth of Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes or Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) codes. In this paper, for minimizing the repair bandwidth of parity nodes of the known MSR codes with high rate, which is usually the whole size of the original data, i.e., the maximal, a new systematic piggybacking design is proposed through an in-depth analysis of the design of piggybacking. As a result, new MSR codes are obtained with almost optimal repair bandwidth of parity nodes while retaining the optimal repair bandwidth of systematic node…
We study the exact and optimal repair of multiple failures in codes for distributed storage. More particularly, we examine the use of interference alignment to build exact scalar minimum storage coordinated regenerating codes (MSCR). We show that it is possible to build codes for the case of k = 2 and d > k by aligning interferences independently but that this technique cannot be applied as soon as k > 2 and d > k. Our results also apply to adaptive regenerating codes.
Due to the use of commodity software and hardware, crash-stop and Byzantine failures are likely to be more prevalent in today's large-scale distributed storage systems. Regenerating codes have been shown to be a more efficient way to disperse information across multiple nodes and recover crash-stop failures in the literature. In this paper, we present the design of regeneration codes in conjunction with integrity check that allows exact regeneration of failed nodes and data reconstruction in presence of Byzantine failures. A progressive decoding mechanism is incorporated in both procedures to …
A private information retrieval (PIR) scheme allows a user to retrieve a file from a database without revealing any information on the file being requested. As of now, PIR schemes have been proposed for several kinds of storage systems, including replicated and MDS-coded data. In this paper, the problem of constructing a PIR scheme on regenerating codes is considered. A regenerating code is a storage code whose codewords are distributed among $n$ nodes, enabling efficient storage of files, as well as low-bandwidth retrieval of files and repair of nodes. In this work, a PIR scheme on regenerati…
In this paper, we revisit the problem of finding the longest systematic-length $k$ for a linear minimum storage regenerating (MSR) code with optimal repair of only systematic part, for a given per-node storage capacity $l$ and an arbitrary number of parity nodes $r$. We study the problem by following a geometric analysis of linear subspaces and operators. First, a simple quadratic bound is given, which implies that $k=r+2$ is the largest number of systematic nodes in the \emph{scalar} scenario. Second, an $r$-based-log bound is derived, which is superior to the upper bound on log-base $2$ in t…
Regenerating code is a class of code very suitable for distributed storage systems, which can maintain optimal bandwidth and storage space. Two types of important regenerating code have been constructed: the minimum storage regeneration (MSR) code and the minimum bandwidth regeneration (MBR) code. However, in hostile networks where adversaries can compromise storage nodes, the storage capacity of the network can be significantly affected. In this paper, we propose two optimal constructions of regenerating codes through rate-matching that can combat against this kind of adversaries in hostile n…
This short note revisits the problem of designing secure minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes for distributed storage systems. A secure MSR code ensures that a distributed storage system does not reveal the stored information to a passive eavesdropper. The eavesdropper is assumed to have access to the content stored on $\ell_1$ number of storage nodes in the system and the data downloaded during the bandwidth efficient repair of an additional $\ell_2$ number of storage nodes. This note combines the Gabidulin codes based precoding [18] and a new construction of MSR codes (without security r…
Here, we revisit the problem of exploring the secrecy capacity of minimum storage cooperative regenerating (MSCR) codes under the $\{l_1,l_2\}$-eavesdropper model, where the eavesdropper can observe the data stored on $l_1$ nodes and the repair downloads of an additional $l_2$ nodes. Compared to minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes which support only single node repairs, MSCR codes allow efficient simultaneous repairs of multiple failed nodes, referred to as a \emph{repair group}. However, the repair data sent from a helper node to another failed node may vary with different repair groups …
In this paper, we revisit the problem of characterizing the secrecy capacity of minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes under the passive $(l_1,l_2)$-eavesdropper model, where the eavesdropper has access to data stored on $l_1$ nodes and the repair data for an additional $l_2$ nodes. We study it from the information-theoretic perspective. First, some general properties of MSR codes as well as a simple and generally applicable upper bound on secrecy capacity are given. Second, a new concept of \emph{stable} MSR codes is introduced, where the stable property is shown to be closely linked with s…
Erasure coding is widely used for massive storage in data centers to achieve high fault tolerance and low storage redundancy. Since the cross-rack communication cost is often high, it is critical to design erasure codes that minimize the cross-rack repair bandwidth during failure repair. In this paper, we analyze the optimal trade-off between storage redundancy and cross-rack repair bandwidth specifically for data centers, subject to the condition that the original data can be reconstructed from a sufficient number of any non-failed nodes. We characterize the optimal trade-off curve under func…
In large data centers, storage nodes are organized in racks, and the cross-rack transmission dominates the bandwidth cost. For the repair of single node failures, codes achieving the tradeoff between the storage redundancy and cross-rack repair bandwidth are called rack-aware regenerating codes (RRCs). In this work, we give the first explicit construction of RRCs with the minimum repair bandwidth (i.e., the cross-rack bandwidth equals the storage size per node). Our construction applies to all admissible parameters and has the lowest sub-packetization level. Moreover, the underlying finite fie…
Regenerating codes are a class of codes for distributed storage networks that provide reliability and availability of data, and also perform efficient node repair. Another important aspect of a distributed storage network is its security. In this paper, we consider a threat model where an eavesdropper may gain access to the data stored in a subset of the storage nodes, and possibly also, to the data downloaded during repair of some nodes. We provide explicit constructions of regenerating codes that achieve information-theoretic secrecy capacity in this setting.
This paper addresses the problem of constructing secure exact-repair regenerating codes at the MSR point for all feasible values of the parameters. The setting involves a passive eavesdropper who is allowed to observe the stored contents of, and the downloads into, an $l$-subset of the $n$ nodes of a distributed storage system (DSS). The objective is to achieve perfect secrecy between the eavesdropped symbols and the file stored on the DSS. Previous secure code constructions (most notably that by Rawat et al.) tackle the problem only for the restricted case wherein the number, $d$, of helper n…
Regenerating codes provide an efficient way to recover data at failed nodes in distributed storage systems. It has been shown that regenerating codes can be designed to minimize the per-node storage (called MSR) or minimize the communication overhead for regeneration (called MBR). In this work, we propose a new encoding scheme for [n,d] error- correcting MSR codes that generalizes our earlier work on error-correcting regenerating codes. We show that by choosing a suitable diagonal matrix, any generator matrix of the [n,α] Reed-Solomon (RS) code can be integrated into the encoding matrix. Hence…
Regenerating codes are a class of codes proposed for providing reliability of data and efficient repair of failed nodes in distributed storage systems. In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of handling errors and erasures during the data-reconstruction and node-repair operations. We provide explicit regenerating codes that are resilient to errors and erasures, and show that these codes are optimal with respect to storage and bandwidth requirements. As a special case, we also establish the capacity of a class of distributed storage systems in the presence of malicious adversaries. W…
In this paper, we propose a generalized version of the Rashmi-Shah-Kumar Minimum-Storage-Regenerating(RSK-MSR) codes based on the product-matrix framework. For any $(n,k,d)$ such that $d \geq 2k-2$ and $d \leq n-1$, we can directly construct an $(n,k,d)$ MSR code without constructing a larger MSR code and shortening of the larger MSR code. As a result, the size of a finite field over which the proposed code is defined is smaller than or equal to the size of a finite field over which the RSK-MSR code is defined. In addition, the $\{\ell,\ell'\}$ secure codes based on the generalized RSK-MSR cod…
We consider the rack-aware storage system where $n=\bar{n}u$ nodes are organized in $\bar{n}$ racks each containing $u$ nodes, and any $k=\bar{k}u+u_0~(0\leq u_0<u)$ nodes can retrieve the original data file. More importantly, the cross-rack communication cost is much more expensive than the intra-rack communication cost, so that the latter is usually neglected in the system bandwidth. The MSRR (minimum storage rack-aware regenerating) code is an important variation of regenerating codes that achieves the optimal repair bandwidth for single node failures in the rack-aware model. However, expli…
In this paper, three outer bounds on the normalized storage-repair bandwidth (S-RB) tradeoff of regenerating codes having parameter set $\{(n,k,d),(α,β)\}$ under the exact-repair (ER) setting are presented. The first outer bound is applicable for every parameter set $(n,k,d)$ and in conjunction with a code construction known as {\em improved layered codes}, it characterizes the normalized ER tradeoff for the case $(n,k=3,d=n-1)$. It establishes a non-vanishing gap between the ER and functional-repair (FR) tradeoffs for every $(n,k,d)$. The second bound is an improvement upon an existing bound …
Heterogeneous Distributed Storage Systems (DSSs) are close to the real world applications for data storage. Each node of the considered DSS, may store different number of packets and each having different repair bandwidth with uniform repair traffic. For such heterogeneous DSS, a failed node can be repaired with the help of some specific nodes. In this work, a family of codes based on graph theory, is constructed which achieves the fundamental bound on file size for the particular heterogeneous DSS.
This paper presents and analyzes a novel concatenated coding scheme for enabling error resilience in two distributed storage settings: one being storage using existing regenerating codes and the second being storage using locally repairable codes. The concatenated coding scheme brings together a maximum rank distance (MRD) code as an outer code and either a globally regenerating or a locally repairable code as an inner code. Also, error resilience for combination of locally repairable codes with regenerating codes is considered. This concatenated coding system is designed to handle two differe…
Typically, locally repairable codes (LRCs) and regenerating codes have been studied independently of each other, and it has not been clear how the parameters of one relate to those of the other. In this paper, a novel connection between locally repairable codes and exact regenerating codes is established. Via this connection, locally repairable codes are interpreted as exact regenerating codes. Further, some of these codes are shown to perform better than time-sharing codes between minimum bandwidth regenerating and minimum storage regenerating codes.
Regenerating codes are efficient methods for distributed storage in storage networks, where node failures are common. They guarantee low cost data reconstruction and repair through accessing only a predefined number of arbitrarily chosen storage nodes in the network. In this work we consider two simultaneous extensions to the original regenerating codes framework introduced in [1]; i) both data reconstruction and repair are resilient to the presence of a certain number of erroneous nodes in the network and ii) the number of helper nodes in every repair is not fixed, but is a flexible parameter…
In a modern distributed storage system, storage nodes are organized in racks, and the cross-rack communication dominates the system bandwidth. In We study the rack-aware storage system where all storage nodes are organized in racks and within each rack the nodes can communicate freely without taxing the system bandwidth. Rack-aware regenerating codes (RRCs) were proposed for minimizing the repair bandwidth for single erasures. In the initial setting of RRCs, the repair of a single node requires the participation of all the remaining nodes in the rack containing the failed node as well as a lar…
We consider a set up where a file of size M is stored in n distributed storage nodes, using an (n,k) minimum storage regenerating (MSR) code, i.e., a maximum distance separable (MDS) code that also allows efficient exact-repair of any failed node. The problem of interest in this paper is to minimize the repair bandwidth B for exact regeneration of a single failed node, i.e., the minimum data to be downloaded by a new node to replace the failed node by its exact replica. Previous work has shown that a bandwidth of B=[M(n-1)]/[k(n-k)] is necessary and sufficient for functional (not exact) regene…
A passive adversary can eavesdrop stored content or downloaded content of some storage nodes, in order to learn illegally about the file stored across a distributed storage system (DSS). Previous work in the literature focuses on code constructions that trade storage capacity for perfect security. In other words, by decreasing the amount of original data that it can store, the system can guarantee that the adversary, which eavesdrops up to a certain number of storage nodes, obtains no information (in Shannon's sense) about the original data. In this work we introduce the concept of block secur…
Cooperative regenerating codes are designed for repairing multiple node failures in distributed storage systems. In contrast to the original repair model of regenerating codes, which are for the repair of single node failure, data exchange among the new nodes is enabled. It is known that further reduction in repair bandwidth is possible with cooperative repair. Currently in the literature, we have an explicit construction of exact-repair cooperative code achieving all parameters corresponding to the minimum-bandwidth point. We give a slightly generalized and more flexible version of this coope…
We consider the problem of designing codes for distributed storage that protect user data against eavesdroppers that can gain access to network links as well as individual nodes. Our goal is to achieve weak security (also known as block security) that requires that the eavesdroppers would not be able to decode individual files or combinations of a small number of files. The standard approach for achieving block security is to use a joint design scheme that consists of (inner) storage code and the (outer) coset code. However, jointly designing the codes requires that the user, who pre-processes…
Regenerating codes for distributed storage have attracted much research interest in the past decade. Such codes trade the bandwidth needed to repair a failed node with the overall amount of data stored in the network. Minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes are an important class of optimal regenerating codes that minimize (first) the amount of data stored per node and (then) the repair bandwidth. Specifically, an $[n,k,d]$-$(α)$ MSR code $\mathbb{C}$ over $\mathbb{F}_q$ is defined as follows. Using such a code $\mathbb{C}$, a file $\cal{F}$ consisting of $αk$ symbols over $\mathbb{F}_q$ can …
We consider the rack-aware storage system where \(n\) nodes are organized in \(\bar{n}\) racks each containing \(u\) nodes, and any \(k\) nodes can retrieve the stored file. Moreover, any single node erasure can be recovered by downloading data from \(\bar{d}\) helper racks as well as the remaining \(u\!-\!1\) nodes in the same rack. Previous work mostly focuses on minimizing the cross-rack repair bandwidth under the condition \(\bar{d}\geq \bar{k}\), where \(\bar{k}=\lfloor\frac{k}{u}\rfloor\). However, \(\bar{d}\geq \bar{k}\) is not an intrinsic condition for the rack-aware storage model. In…
We study the exact and optimal repair of multiple failures in codes for distributed storage. More particularly, we provide an explicit construction of exact minimum bandwidth coordinated regenerating codes (MBCR) for n=d+t,k,d >= k,t >= 1. Our construction differs from existing constructions by allowing both t>1 (i.e., repair of multiple failures) and d>k (i.e., contacting more than k devices during repair).
Regenerating codes (RCs) can significantly reduce the repair-bandwidth of distributed storage networks. Initially, the analysis of RCs was based on the assumption that during the repair process, the newcomer does not distinguish (among all surviving nodes) which nodes to access, i.e., the newcomer is oblivious to the set of helpers being used. Such a scheme is termed the blind helper selection (BHS) scheme. Nonetheless, it is intuitive in practice that the newcomer should choose to access only those "good" helpers. In this two-part paper, a new characterization of the effect of choosing the he…
Regenerating codes are a class of distributed storage codes that optimally trade the bandwidth needed for repair of a failed node with the amount of data stored per node of the network. Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) codes minimize first, the amount of data stored per node, and then the repair bandwidth, while Minimum Bandwidth Regenerating (MBR) codes carry out the minimization in the reverse order. An [n, k, d] regenerating code permits the data to be recovered by connecting to any k of the n nodes in the network, while requiring that repair of a failed node be made possible by connectin…
Using the idea of interference alignment, Suh and Ramchandran constructed a class of minimum-storage regenerating codes which can repair one systematic or one parity-check node with optimal repair bandwidth. With the same code structure, we show that in addition to single node failure, double node failures can be repaired collaboratively with optimal repair bandwidth as well. We give an example of how to repair double failures in the Suh-Ramchandran regenerating code with six nodes, and give the proof for the general case.
Regenerating codes (RCs) can significantly reduce the repair-bandwidth of distributed storage networks. Initially, the analysis of RCs was based on the assumption that during the repair process, the newcomer does not distinguish (among all surviving nodes) which nodes to access, i.e., the newcomer is oblivious to the set of helpers being used. Such a scheme is termed the blind repair (BR) scheme. Nonetheless, it is intuitive in practice that the newcomer should choose to access only those "good" helpers. In this paper, a new characterization of the effect of choosing the helper nodes in terms …
In this paper, we provide explicit constructions for a class of exact-repair regenerating codes that possess a layered structure. These regenerating codes correspond to interior points on the storage-repair-bandwidth tradeoff, and compare very well in comparison to scheme that employs space-sharing between MSR and MBR codes. For the parameter set $(n,k,d=k)$ with $n < 2k-1$, we construct a class of codes with an auxiliary parameter $w$, referred to as canonical codes. With $w$ in the range $n-k < w < k$, these codes operate in the region between the MSR point and the MBR point, and perform sig…
Blockchain is a distributed ledger with wide applications. Due to the increasing storage requirement for blockchains, the computation can be afforded by only a few miners. Sharding has been proposed to scale blockchains so that storage and transaction efficiency of the blockchain improves at the cost of security guarantee. This paper aims to consider a new protocol, Secure-Repair-Blockchain (SRB), which aims to decrease the storage cost at the miners. In addition, SRB also decreases the bootstrapping cost, which allows for new miners to easily join a sharded blockchain. In order to reduce stor…
Exact-repair regenerating codes are considered for the case (n,k,d)=(4,3,3), for which a complete characterization of the rate region is provided. This characterization answers in the affirmative the open question whether there exists a non-vanishing gap between the optimal bandwidth-storage tradeoff of the functional-repair regenerating codes (i.e., the cut-set bound) and that of the exact-repair regenerating codes. The converse proof relies on the existence of symmetric optimal solutions. For the achievability, only one non-trivial corner point of the rate region needs to be addressed, for w…