Enhancing Erasure Resilience in Reed-Solomon Codes: Theory and Applications in Data Storage Systems

Abstract

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are widely utilized in data storage and communication systems due to their robust error detection and correction capabilities. However, traditional RS codes encounter challenges in addressing the increasing data corruption rates demanded by modern storage systems. This paper aims to overcome these limitations by modifying and extending the structure of traditional RS codes, particularly enhancing their recovery capabilities in the face of significant data loss. We begin by reviewing the theoretical foundations of RS codes and existing extension methods and discussing emerging technologies integrated into RS codes. We then present detailed methodologies for RS code encoding, erasure recovery mechanisms, soft decision decoding, and interleaving coding techniques, followed by a series of experiments designed to test the proposed methods. The experimental results indicate that soft-decision decoding outperforms traditional hard-decision decoding under high signal-to-noise ratio conditions, albeit with increased computational complexity as the list of candidate codewords grows. Interleaved Reed-Solomon (IRS) coding offers improved performance under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions but may introduce additional system complexity due to the interleaving and deinterleaving processes. We conclude with a summary of the research findings, a discussion of the study’s limitations, and suggestions for future research directions.