No Arabic abstract
Fractional repetition (FR) codes are a family of repair-efficient storage codes that provide exact and uncoded node repair at the minimum bandwidth regenerating point. The advantageous repair properties are achieved by a tailor-made two-layer encoding scheme which concatenates an outer maximum-distance-separable (MDS) code and an inner repetition code. In this paper, we generalize the application of FR codes and propose heterogeneous fractional repetition (HFR) code, which is adaptable to the scenario where the repetition degrees of coded packets are different. We provide explicit code constructions by utilizing group divisible designs, which allow the design of HFR codes over a large range of parameters. The constructed codes achieve the system storage capacity under random access repair and have multiple repair alternatives for node failures. Further, we take advantage of the systematic feature of MDS codes and present a novel design framework of HFR codes, in which storage nodes can be wisely partitioned into clusters such that data reconstruction time can be reduced when contacting nodes in the same cluster.
This paper proposes a polar code construction scheme that reduces constituent-code supplemented decoding latency. Constituent codes are the sub-codewords with specific patterns. They are used to accelerate the successive cancellation decoding process of polar code without any performance degradation. We modify the traditional construction approach to yield increased number of desirable constituent codes that speeds the decoding process. For (n,k) polar code, instead of directly setting the k best and (n-k) worst bits to the information bits and frozen bits, respectively, we swap the locations of some information and frozen bits carefully according to the qualities of their equivalent channels. We conducted the simulation of 1024 and 2048 bits length polar codes with multiple rates and analyzed the decoding latency for various length codes. The numerical results show that the proposed construction scheme generally is able to achieve at least around 20% latency deduction with an negligible loss in gain with carefully selected optimization threshold.
In order to accommodate the ever-growing data from various, possibly independent, sources and the dynamic nature of data usage rates in practical applications, modern cloud data storage systems are required to be scalable, flexible, and heterogeneous. The recent rise of the blockchain technology is also moving various information systems towards decentralization to achieve high privacy at low costs. While codes with hierarchical locality have been intensively studied in the context of centralized cloud storage due to their effectiveness in reducing the average reading time, those for decentralized storage networks (DSNs) have not yet been discussed. In this paper, we propose a joint coding scheme where each node receives extra protection through the cooperation with nodes in its neighborhood in a heterogeneous DSN with any given topology. This work extends and subsumes our prior work on coding for centralized cloud storage. In particular, our proposed construction not only preserves desirable properties such as scalability and flexibility, which are critical in dynamic networks, but also adapts to arbitrary topologies, a property that is essential in DSNs but has been overlooked in existing works.
The secrecy of a distributed-storage system for passwords is studied. The encoder, Alice, observes a length-n password and describes it using two hints, which she stores in different locations. The legitimate receiver, Bob, observes both hints. In one scenario the requirement is that the expected number of guesses it takes Bob to guess the password approach one as n tends to infinity, and in the other that the expected size of the shortest list that Bob must form to guarantee that it contain the password approach one. The eavesdropper, Eve, sees only one of the hints. Assuming that Alice cannot control which hints Eve observes, the largest normalized (by n) exponent that can be guaranteed for the expected number of guesses it takes Eve to guess the password is characterized for each scenario. Key to the proof are new results on Arikans guessing and Bunte and Lapidoths task-encoding problem; in particular, the paper establishes a close relation between the two problems. A rate-distortion version of the model is also discussed, as is a generalization that allows for Alice to produce {delta} (not necessarily two) hints, for Bob to observe { u} (not necessarily two) of the hints, and for Eve to observe {eta} (not necessarily one) of the hints. The generalized model is robust against {delta} - { u} disk failures.
This paper aims to go beyond resilience into the study of security and local-repairability for distributed storage systems (DSS). Security and local-repairability are both important as features of an efficient storage system, and this paper aims to understand the trade-offs between resilience, security, and local-repairability in these systems. In particular, this paper first investigates security in the presence of colluding eavesdroppers, where eavesdroppers are assumed to work together in decoding stored information. Second, the paper focuses on coding schemes that enable optimal local repairs. It further brings these two concepts together, to develop locally repairable coding schemes for DSS that are secure against eavesdroppers. The main results of this paper include: a. An improved bound on the secrecy capacity for minimum storage regenerating codes, b. secure coding schemes that achieve the bound for some special cases, c. a new bound on minimum distance for locally repairable codes, d. code construction for locally repairable codes that attain the minimum distance bound, and e. repair-bandwidth-efficient locally repairable codes with and without security constraints.
Information theory and the framework of information dynamics have been used to provide tools to characterise complex systems. In particular, we are interested in quantifying information storage, information modification and information transfer as characteristic elements of computation. Although these quantities are defined for autonomous dynamical systems, information dynamics can also help to get a wholistic understanding of input-driven systems such as neural networks. In this case, we do not distinguish between the system itself, and the effects the input has to the system. This may be desired in some cases, but it will change the questions we are able to answer, and is consequently an important consideration, for example, for biological systems which perform non-trivial computations and also retain a short-term memory of past inputs. Many other real world systems like cortical networks are also heavily input-driven, and application of tools designed for autonomous dynamic systems may not necessarily lead to intuitively interpretable results. The aim of our work is to extend the measurements used in the information dynamics framework for input-driven systems. Using the proposed input-corrected information storage we hope to better quantify system behaviour, which will be important for heavily input-driven systems like artificial neural networks to abstract from specific benchmarks, or for brain networks, where intervention is difficult, individual components cannot be tested in isolation or with arbitrary input data.