Repairing Reed-Solomon Codes With Multiple Erasures

Abstract

Despite their exceptional error-correcting properties, Reed-Solomon (RS) codes have been overlooked in distributed storage applications due to the common belief that they have poor repair bandwidth. A naive repair approach would require for the whole file to be reconstructed in order to recover a single erased codeword symbol. In a recent work, Guruswami and Wootters (STOC'16) proposed a single erasure repair method for RS codes that achieves the optimal repair bandwidth amongst all linear encoding schemes. Their key idea is to recover the erased symbol by collecting a sufficiently large number of its traces, each of which can be constructed from a number of traces of other symbols. We extend the trace collection technique to cope with two and three erasures.