A Decentralized Repair Mechanism for Decentralized Erasure Code based Storage Systems

Abstract

Erasure code based distributed storage systems provide data robustness by storing encoded-fragments over servers. To maintain data robustness, a repair mechanism recovers a storage system from server failures by repairing encoded-fragments. For decentralized erasure code based storage systems, we propose a decentralized repair mechanism. Our mechanism has the following features. Firstly, an encoded-fragment is replenished by a combination of a number u of encoded-fragments that are randomly chosen. Secondly, the number u depends on the number of the available encoded-fragments and is independent of the pattern of missing encoded-fragments. Thirdly, multiple encoded-fragments are simultaneously replenished in parallel. We measure the communication cost in terms of the number u of required network connections for replenishing an encoded-fragment. We then conducted a numerical analysis by using traces of real systems. We find that our requirement on u is smaller than that from existing methods. Both theoretical and numerical results show that our decentralized repair mechanism outperforms existing ones in terms of the communication cost under the same consideration of efficiency cost for storage.