Title
Fundamental limits on communication for oblivious updates in storage networks
Abstract
In distributed storage systems, storage nodes intermittently go offline for numerous reasons. On coming back online, nodes need to update their contents to reflect any modifications to the data in the interim. In this paper, we consider a setting where no information regarding modified data needs to be logged in the system. In such a setting, a `stale' node needs to update its contents by downloading data from already updated nodes, while neither the stale node nor the updated nodes have any knowledge as to which data symbols are modified and what their value is. We investigate the fundamental limits on the amount of communication necessary for such an oblivious update process. We first present a generic lower bound on the amount of communication that is necessary under any storage code with a linear encoding (while allowing non-linear update protocols). This lower bound is derived under a set of extremely weak conditions, giving all updated nodes access to the entire modified data and the stale node access to the entire stale data as side information. We then present codes and update algorithms that are optimal in that they meet this lower bound. Next, we present a lower bound for an important subclass of codes, that of linear Maximum-Distance-Separable (MDS) codes. We then present an MDS code construction and an associated update algorithm that meets this lower bound. These results thus establish the capacity of oblivious updates in terms of the communication requirements under these settings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/GLOCOM.2014.7037161
Global Communications Conference
Keywords
DocType
Volume
digital storage,encoding,linear codes,protocols,MDS code construction,data symbols,distributed storage systems,linear encoding,linear maximum-distance-separable codes,nonlinear update protocols,side information,stale data,stale node,storage code,storage networks,storage nodes
Journal
abs/1409.1666
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2334-0983
4
0.41
References 
Authors
13
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Preetum Nakkiran1646.05
Nihar B. Shah2120277.17
Rashmi K. V.3100765.03