Practical Considerations in Repairing Reed-Solomon Codes

The issue of repairing Reed-Solomon codes currently employed in industry has been sporadically discussed in the literature. In this work we carry out a systematic study of these codes and investigate important aspects of repairing them under the trace repair framework, including which evaluation points to select and how to implement a trace repair scheme efficiently. In particular, we employ different heuristic algorithms to search for low-bandwidth repair schemes for codes of short lengths with typical redundancies and establish three tables of current best repair schemes for [n, k] Reed-Solomon codes over GF(256) with 4 ≤ n ≤ 16 and r = n − k ∈ {2, 3, 4}. The tables cover most known codes currently used in the distributed storage industry.