An Improved Cooperative Repair Scheme for Reed-Solomon Codes

Dau et al. recently extend Guruswami and Wootters' scheme (STOC'2016) to cooperatively repair two or three erasures in Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. However, their scheme restricts to either the case that the characteristic of $F$ divides the extension degree $[F\!:\!B]$ or some special failure patterns, where $F$ is the base field of the RS code and $B$ is the subfield of the repair symbols. In this paper, we derive an improved cooperative repair scheme that removes all these restrictions. That is, our scheme applies to any characteristic of $F$ and can repair all failure patterns of two or three erasures.