In a wireless storage system, having to communicate over a fading channel makes repair transmissions prone to physical layer errors. The first approach to combat fading is to utilize the existing optimal space-time codes. However, it was recently pointed out that such codes are in general too complex to decode when the number of helper nodes is bigger than the number of antennas at the newcomer or data collector. In this paper, a novel protocol for wireless storage transmissions based on algebraic space-time codes is presented in order to improve the system reliability while enabling feasible decoding. The diversity-multiplexing gain tradeoff (DMT) of the system together with sphere-decodability even with low number of antennas are used as the main design criteria, thus naturally establishing a DMT-complexity tradeoff. It is shown that the proposed protocol outperforms the simple time-division multiple access (TDMA) protocol, while still falling behind the optimal DMT.
Regenerating codes are a class of codes proposed for providing reliability of data and efficient repair of failed nodes in distributed storage systems. In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of handling errors and erasures at the nodes or links, during the data-reconstruction and node-repair operations. We provide explicit regenerating codes that are resilient to errors and erasures, and show that these codes are optimal with respect to storage and bandwidth requirements. As a special case, we also establish the capacity of a class of distributed storage systems in the presence of malicious adversaries. While our code constructions are based on previously constructed Product-Matrix codes, we also provide necessary and sufficient conditions for introducing resilience in any regenerating code. We consider a distributed storage system employing some existing regenerate codes where the storage nodes are scattered in a wireless network. The data collector connects to the storage nodes via orthogonal channels and downloads data symbols from these nodes. In the existing data reconstruction schemes for distributed storage systems, the data collector downloads all symbols from a subset of the storage nodes. Such a full-downloading approach becomes inefficient in wireless networks since due to fading, the wireless channels may not offer sufficient bandwidths for full downloading. Moreover, full-downloading is also less power efficient than partial downloading. In this paper, given a coding scheme employed by the wireless distributed storage system, we propose a partial downloading scheme that allows downloading a portion of the symbols from any storage node. We formulate a cross-layer wireless resource allocation problem for data reconstruction in distributed storage systems employing such partial downloading. To derive the fundamental properties of partial downloading as well as to reduce the complexity of wireless resource allocation, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for data reconstructability for partial downloading, in terms of the numbers of downloaded symbols from the storage nodes. We also propose channel and power allocation schemes for partial downloading in wireless distributed storage systems. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the significant power savings by the proposed partial downloading scheme compared to the full-downloading methods for distributed storage. 