Exact optimized-cost repair in multi-hop distributed storage networks

The problem of exact repair of a failed node in multi-hop networked distributed storage systems is considered. Contrary to the most of the current studies which model the repair process by the direct links from surviving nodes to the new node, the repair is modeled by considering the multi-hop network structure, and taking into account that there might not exist direct links from all the surviving nodes to the new node. In the repair problem of these systems, surviving nodes may cooperate to transmit the repair traffic to the new node. In this setting, we define the total number of packets transmitted between nodes as repair-cost. A lower bound of the repair-cost can thus be found by cut-set bound analysis. In this paper, we show that the lower bound of the repair-cost is achievable for the exact repair of MDS codes in tandem and grid networks, thus resulting in the minimum-cost exact MDS codes. Further, two suboptimal (achievable) bounds for the large scale grid networks are proposed.