Robust Repair of Reed-Solomon Codes

Abstract

We study the problem of robust repair of a single erasure in Reed--Solomon codes under low communication bandwidth. Focusing on the Guruswami--Wootters trace repair framework, we investigate whether a failed node can be correctly repaired in the presence of erroneous responses from helper nodes. Equivalently, we view the collection of downloaded traces as a code, which we call the repair-trace code. By characterizing the zero coefficients of the associated polynomial in terms of cyclotomic cosets, we derive upper bounds on the dimension $k$ that allow correction of a given number of erroneous traces $e$, as well as lower bounds on the minimum distance as a function of $k$. For the case $q=2$, we exploit explicit formulas for cyclotomic coset representatives to obtain the exact optimal dimension bound for single-error correction. We also propose two efficient robust repair schemes. Our first scheme achieves the error-correction capability guaranteed by the BCH bound. To approach a stronger bound based on character sums, we develop a second scheme that tolerates more errors at the cost of an additional factor $n$ in computational complexity.