Locally Repairable Regenerating Codes: Node Unavailability and the Insufficiency of Stationary Local Repair

Locally repairable codes (LRCs) are ingeniously designed distributed storage codes with a (usually small) bounded number of helper nodes participating in repair. Since most existing LRCs assume exact repair and allow full exchange of the stored data (β = α), they can be viewed as a generalization of the traditional erasure codes (ECs) with a much desired feature of local repair. However, it also means that they lack the features of functional repair and partial information-exchange (β < α) in the original regenerating codes (RCs). Motivated by the significant bandwidth (BW) reduction of RCs over ECs, existing works by Ahmad et al and by Hollmann studied “locally repairable regenerating codes (LRRCs)” that simultaneously admit all three features: local repair, partial information-exchange, and functional repair. Significant BW reduction was observed. One important issue for any local repair schemes (including both LRCs and LRRCs) is that sometimes designated helper nodes may be temporarily unavailable, the result of multiple failures, degraded reads, or other network dynamics. Under the setting of LRRCs with temporary node unavailability, this work studies the impact of different helper selection methods. It proves, for the first time in the literature, that with node unavailability, all existing methods of helper selection, including those used in RCs and LRCs, are strictly repair-BW suboptimal. For some scenarios, it is necessary to combine LRRCs with a new helper selection method, termed dynamic helper selection, to achieve optimal BW. This work also compares the performance of different helper selection methods and answers the following fundamental question: whether one method of helper selection is intrinsically better than the other? for various different scenarios.