Error correction based on partial information

Abstract

We consider the decoding of linear and array codes from errors when we are only allowed to download a part of the codeword. More specifically, suppose that we have encoded $k$ data symbols using an $(n,k)$ code with code length $n$ and dimension $k.$ During storage, some of the codeword coordinates might be corrupted by errors. We aim to recover the original data by reading the corrupted codeword with a limit on the transmitting bandwidth, namely, we can only download an $α$ proportion of the corrupted codeword. For a given $α,$ our objective is to design a code and a decoding scheme such that we can recover the original data from the largest possible number of errors. A naive scheme is to read $αn$ coordinates of the codeword. This method used in conjunction with MDS codes guarantees recovery from any $\lfloor(αn-k)/2\rfloor$ errors. In this paper we show that we can instead read an $α$ proportion from each of the codeword's coordinates. For a well-designed MDS code, this method can guarantee recovery from $\lfloor (n-k/α)/2 \rfloor$ errors, which is $1/α$ times more than the naive method, and is also the maximum number of errors that an $(n,k)$ code can correct by downloading only an $α$ proportion of the codeword. We present two families of such optimal constructions and decoding schemes. One is a Reed-Solomon code with evaluation points in a subfield and the other is based on Folded Reed-Solomon codes. We further show that both code constructions attain asymptotically optimal list decoding radius when downloading only a part of the corrupted codeword. We also construct an ensemble of random codes that with high probability approaches the upper bound on the number of correctable errors when the decoder downloads an $α$ proportion of the corrupted codeword.