Exact-Repair Regenerating Codes Via Layered Erasure Correction and Block Designs

A new class of exact-repair regenerating codes is constructed by combining two layers of erasure correction codes together with combinatorial block designs, e.g., Steiner systems, balanced incomplete block designs and t-designs. The proposed codes have the "uncoded repair" property where the nodes participating in the repair simply transfer part of the stored data directly, without performing any computation. The layered error correction structure makes the decoding process rather straightforward, and in general the complexity is low. We show that this construction is able to achieve performance better than time-sharing between the minimum storage regenerating codes and the minimum repair-bandwidth regenerating codes.