Distributed storage systems (DSSs) have gained a lot of interest recently, thanks to their robustness and scalability compared to single-device storage. Majority of the related research has exclusively concerned the network layer. At the same time, the number of users of, e.g., peer-to-peer (p2p) and device-to-device (d2d) networks as well as proximity based services is growing rapidly, and the mobility of users is considered more and more important. This motivates, in contrast to the existing literature, the study of the physical layer functionality of wireless distributed storage systems. In this paper, we take the first step towards protecting the storage repair transmissions from physical layer errors when the transmission takes place over a fading channel. To this end, we introduce the notion of a space-time storage code, drawing together the aspects of network layer and physical layer functionality and resulting in cross-layer robustness. It is also pointed out that existing space-time codes are too complex to be utilized in storage networks when the number of helpers involved is larger than the number of receive antennas at the newcomer or data collector, hence creating a call for less complex transmission protocols.
Isolated from the storage point of view, on the other hand, a plethora of research has been carried out during the past two decades in wireless communications (see @cite_1 and the references therein). Motivated by this work, we will introduce the notion of , a class of codes that should be able to resist fading of the signals during repair transmissions, while also maintaining the repair property of the underlying storage code.
@cite_1
1999730868 2154063365 2153077717 2111621260
A new class of exact-repair regenerating codes is constructed by stitching together shorter erasure correction codes, where the stitching pattern can be viewed as block designs. The proposed codes have the help-by-transfer property where the helper nodes simply transfer part of the stored data directly, without performing any computation. This embedded error correction structure makes the decoding process straightforward, and in some cases the complexity is very low. We show that this construction is able to achieve performance better than space-sharing between the minimum storage regenerating codes and the minimum repair-bandwidth regenerating codes, and it is the first class of codes to achieve this performance. In fact, it is shown that the proposed construction can achieve a nontrivial point on the optimal functional-repair tradeoff, and it is asymptotically optimal at high rate, i.e., it asymptotically approaches the minimum storage and the minimum repair-bandwidth simultaneously. In distributed storage systems that employ erasure coding, the issue of minimizing the total communication required to exactly rebuild a storage node after a failure arises. This repair bandwidth depends on the structure of the storage code and the repair strategies used to restore the lost data. Designing high-rate maximum-distance separable (MDS) codes that achieve the optimum repair communication has been a well-known open problem. Our work resolves, in part, this open problem. In this study, we use Hadamard matrices to construct the first explicit two-parity MDS storage code with optimal repair properties for all single node failures, including the parities. Our construction relies on a novel method of achieving perfect interference alignment over finite fields with a finite number of symbol extensions. We generalize this construction to design @math -parity MDS codes that achieve the optimum repair communication for single systematic node failures. A wireless network with fading and a single source-destination pair is considered. The information reaches the destination via multiple hops through a sequence of layers of single-antenna relays. At high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the simple amplify-and-forward strategy is shown to be optimal in terms of degrees of freedom, because it achieves the degrees of freedom equal to a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. Hence, the lack of coordination in relay nodes does not reduce the achievable degrees of freedom. The performance of this amplify-and-forward strategy degrades with increasing network size. This phenomenon is analyzed by finding the tradeoffs between network size, rate, and diversity. A lower bound on the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff for concatenation of multiple random Gaussian matrices is obtained. Also, it is shown that achievable network size in the outage formulation (short codes) is a lot smaller than the ergodic formulation (long codes). It is shown that the capacity scaling of wireless networks is subject to a fundamental limitation which is independent of power attenuation and fading models. It is a degrees of freedom limitation which is due to the laws of physics. By distributing uniformly an order of n users wishing to establish pairwise independent communications at fixed wavelength inside a two-dimensional domain of size of the order of n, there are an order of n communication requests originating from the central half of the domain to its outer half. Physics dictates that the number of independent information channels across these two regions is only of the order of radicn, so the per-user information capacity must follow an inverse square-root of n law. This result shows that information-theoretic limits of wireless communication problems can be rigorously obtained without relying on stochastic fading channel models, but studying their physical geometric structure.