An Investigation on Reed-Solomon Codes as Erasure Coding Technique on Its Properties and Utilizations

Abstract

Erasure coding is an essential part of cloud computing, which is an important technology for effective data storage for recovering data that may be lost due to various reasons, there are various erasure coding techniques in the market. In this paper, linear MDS codes, which is a branch of erasure coding, will be investigated on their performance and usage. This paper will focus on the Reed-Solomon Code, which is the most implemented form of linear MDS codes, on three different aspects: 1) the methodologies of the encoding and decoding operations; 2) the pros and cons of different forms of Reed-Solomon Codes; 3) the different ways that different Reed-Solomon Codes are being employed. Moreover, the paper includes the definition of general Cloud Computing for the audience to understand its importance, how the erasure coding acts like a fault tolerance system of Cloud Computing, and how different kinds of Reed-Solomon code perform on tolerating erasures in cloud storage failures.