Distributed cloud storage using network coding

Abstract

Distributed storage is usually considered within a cloud provider to ensure availability and reliability of the data. However, the user is still directly dependent on the quality of a single system. It is also entrusting the service provider with large amounts of private data, which may be accessed by a successful attack to that cloud system or even be inspected by government agencies in some countries. This paper advocates a general framework for network coding enabled distributed storage over multiple commercial cloud solutions, such as, Dropbox, Box, Skydrive, and Google Drive, as a way to address these reliability and privacy issues. By means of theoretical analysis and real-life implementations, we show not only that our framework constitutes a viable solution to increase the reliability of stored data and to ensure data privacy, but it also provides a way to reduce the storage costs and to increase the download speed significantly. Our measurements show that the download time could be reduced up to six fold in some scenarios exploiting four commercial cloud solutions.