On Partial Downloading for Wireless Distributed Storage Networks

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.