Capacity and security of heterogeneous distributed storage systems

The capacity of heterogeneous distributed storage systems under repair dynamics is studied. Examples of these systems include peer-to-peer storage clouds, wireless, and Internet caching systems. Nodes in a heterogeneous system can have different storage capacities and different repair bandwidths. Lower and upper bounds on the system capacity are given. These bounds depend on either the average resources per node, or on a detailed knowledge of the node characteristics. Moreover, the case in which nodes may be compromised by an eavesdropper is addressed and bounds on the secrecy capacity of the system are derived. One implication of these new results is that symmetric repair maximizes the capacity of a homogeneous system, which justifies the model widely used in the literature.