Maximum distance separable (MDS) array codes are widely used in storage systems to protect data against erasures. We address the rebuilding ratio problem, namely, in the case of erasures, what is the fraction of the remaining information that needs to be accessed in order to rebuild exactly the lost information? It is clear that when the number of erasures equals the maximum number of erasures that an MDS code can correct, then the rebuilding ratio is 1 (access all the remaining information). However, the interesting and more practical case is when the number of erasures is smaller than the erasure correcting capability of the code. For example, consider an MDS code that can correct two erasures: What is the smallest amount of information that one needs to access in order to correct a single erasure? Previous work showed that the rebuilding ratio is bounded between [1/2] and [3/4]; however, the exact value was left as an open problem. In this paper, we solve this open problem and prove that for the case of a single erasure with a two-erasure correcting code, the rebuilding ratio is [1/2]. In general, we construct a new family of r-erasure correcting MDS array codes that has optimal rebuilding ratio of [1/(r)] in the case of a single erasure. Our array codes have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms (for the cases r=2 and r=3, they use a finite field of size 3 and 4, respectively) and an optimal update property.

We consider the problem of T-Private Information Retrieval with private side information (TPIR-PSI). In this problem, N replicated databases store K independent messages, and a user, equipped with a local cache that holds M messages as side information, wishes to retrieve one of the other K - M messages. The desired message index and the side information must remain jointly private even if any T of the N databases collude. We show that the capacity of TPIR-PSI is (1+ T/N + ⋯ +(T/N) ^{K-M -1} ) ^-1 . As a special case obtained by setting T = 1, this result settles the capacity of PIR-PSI, an open problem previously noted by Kadhe et al. We also consider the problem of symmetric-TPIR with private side information (STPIR-PSI), where the answers from all N databases reveal no information about any other message besides the desired message. We show that the capacity of STPIR-PSI is 1 - T/N if the databases have access to common randomness (not available to the user) that is independent of the messages, in an amount that is at least T/N -T bits per desired message bit. Otherwise, the capacity of STPIR-PSI is zero.

Maximum distance separable (MDS) codes are widely used in storage systems to protect against disk (node) failures. A node is said to have capacity l over some field F, if it can store that amount of symbols of the field. An (n, k, l) MDS code uses n nodes of capacity l to store k information nodes. The MDS property guarantees the resiliency to any n-k node failures. An optimal bandwidth (respectively, optimal access) MDS code communicates (respectively, accesses) the minimum amount of data during the repair process of a single failed node. It was shown that this amount equals a fraction of 1/(n - k) of data stored in each node. In previous optimal bandwidth constructions, l scaled polynomially with k in codes when the asymptotic rate is less than 1. Moreover, in constructions with a constant number of parities, i.e., when the rate approaches 1, l is scaled exponentially with k. In this paper, we focus on the case of linear codes with linear repair operations and constant number of parities n - k = r, and ask the following question: given the capacity of a node l what is the largest number of information disks k in an optimal bandwidth (respectively, access) (k + r, k, l) MDS code? We give an upper bound for the general case, and two tight bounds in the special cases of two important families of codes. The first is a family of codes with optimal update property, and the second is a family with optimal access property. Moreover, the bounds show that in some cases optimal-bandwidth codes have larger k than optimal-access codes, and therefore these two measures are not equivalent.

In distributed storage, a file is stored in a set of nodes and protected by erasure-correcting codes. Regenerating code is a type of code with two properties: first, it can reconstruct the entire file in the presence of any r node erasures for some specified integer r; second, it can efficiently repair an erased node from any subset of remaining nodes with a given size. In the repair process, the amount of information transmitted from each node normalized by the storage size per node is termed repair bandwidth (fraction). When the storage size per node is minimized, the repair bandwidth is lower bounded by 1/r, where r is the number of parity nodes. A code attaining this lower bound is said to have optimal repair. We consider codes with minimum storage size per node and optimal repair, called minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes. In particular, if an MSR code has r parities and any r erasures occur, then by transmitting all the information from the remaining nodes, the original file can be reconstructed. On the other hand, if only one erasure occurs, only a fraction of 1/r of the information in each remaining node needs to be transmitted. If we view each node as a vector or a column over some field, then the code forms a 2-D array. Given the length of the column l and the number of parities r, we explicitly construct the high-rate MSR codes. The number of systematic nodes of our construction is (r + 1) log_r l, which is longer than previously known results. Besides, we construct the MSR codes with other desirable properties: first, the codes with low complexity when the information is updated, and second, the codes with low access or storage node I/O cost during repair.

Motivated by mobile edge computing and wireless data centers, we study a wireless distributed computing framework where the distributed nodes exchange information over a wireless interference network. Our framework follows the structure of MapReduce. This framework consists of Map, Shuffle, and Reduce phases, where Map and Reduce are computation phases and Shuffle is a data transmission phase. In our setting, we assume that the transmission is operated over a wireless interference network. We demonstrate that, by duplicating the computation work at a cluster of distributed nodes in the Map phase, one can reduce the amount of transmission load required for the Shuffle phase. In this work, we characterize the fundamental tradeoff between computation load and communication load, under the assumption of one-shot linear schemes. The proposed scheme is based on side information cancellation and zeroforcing, and we prove that it is optimal in terms of computationcommunication tradeoff. The proposed scheme outperforms the naive TDMA scheme with single node transmission at a time, as well as the coded TDMA scheme that allows coding across data, in terms of the computation-communication tradeoff.

MDS (maximum distance separable) array codes are widely used in storage systems due to their computationally efficient encoding and decoding procedures. An MDS code with r redundancy nodes can correct any r erasures by accessing (reading) all the remaining information in both the systematic nodes and the parity (redundancy) nodes. However, in practice, a single erasure is the most likely failure event; hence, a natural question is how much information do we need to access in order to rebuild a single storage node? We define the rebuilding ratio as the fraction of remaining information accessed during the rebuilding of a single erasure. In our previous work we constructed array codes that achieve the optimal rebuilding ratio of 1/r for the rebuilding of any systematic node, however, all the information needs to be accessed for the rebuilding of the parity nodes. Namely, constructing array codes with a rebuilding ratio of 1/r for an arbitrary erasure was left as an open problem. In this paper, we solve this open problem and present array codes that achieve the lower bound of 1/r for rebuilding any single systematic or parity node.