Transmission and Scheduling Aspects of Distributed Storage and Their Connections with Index Coding

Index coding is often studied with the assumption that a single source has all the messages requested by the receivers. We refer to this as centralized index coding. In contrast, this paper focuses on distributed index coding and addresses the following question: How does the availability of messages at distributed sources (storage nodes) affect the solutions and achievable rates of index coding? An extension to the work of Arbabjolfaei et al. in ISIT 2013 is presented when distributed sources communicate via a semi-deterministic multiple access channel (MAC) to simultaneous receivers. A numbers of examples are discussed that show the effect of message distribution and redundancy across the network on achievable rates of index coding and motivate future research on designing practical network storage codes that offer high index coding rates.