Optimal-cost repair in multi-hop distributed storage systems

In distributed storage systems reliability is achieved through redundant storage nodes distributed in the network. Then a data collector can recover source information even if some nodes fail. To maintain reliability, an autonomous and efficient protocol should be used to reconstruct the failed node. The repair process causes traffic in the network. Recent results in e.g., [1], [2] found the optimal traffic-storage tradeoff, and proposed regenerating codes to achieve the optimality. We investigate the link costs and the impact of network topologies during the repair process. We formulate the minimum cost repair problem in joint and decoupled methods. We investigate the required field size for the joint method. For the decoupled method, we show that the optimization problem is linear for the linear cost. We further show that the cooperation of surviving nodes could efficiently exploit the network topology and reduce the repair cost. The numerical results in tandem, star and grid networks show the benefits of our methods in term of the repair cost.