Replicated erasure codes for storage and repair-traffic efficiency

Abstract

This paper introduces a new family of redundancy schemes for distributed storage systems, called replicated erasure codes (REC), which combine the storage-space efficiency of erasure codes and the repair-traffic efficiency of replication. A formal model for analyzing the storage and repair-traffic costs under availability and persistency constraints is also developed. It is shown that under parameters that characterize common P2P environments, REC generally achieves better results than each of the two methods separately.