Quasicyclic MDS codes for distributed storage with efficient exact repair

In a distributed storage system, codes for efficient repair of failed nodes has attracted significant recent research attention. Ideas from network coding and interference alignment have been used successfully to show bounds and construct coding schemes for efficient repair. In this article, we use ideas from classical algebraic codes to interpret the requirements of efficient repair as existence of certain specific types of codewords in the dual code. Since the construction is quasicyclic and works over small fields, it appears to be a promising method for reducing the computational complexity of efficient repair codes. © 2011 IEEE.