An empirical study on data retrievability in decentralized erasure code based distributed storage systems

Erasure codes are applied in distributed storage systems to provide data robustness against server failures by storing data redundancy among many storage servers. A (n, k) erasure code encodes a data object, which is represented as k elements, into a codeword of n elements such that any k out of these n codeword elements can recover the data object back. Decentralized erasure codes are proposed for distributed storage systems without a central authority. The characteristic of decentralization makes resulting storage systems more scalable and suitable for loosely-organized networking environments. However, different from conventional erasure codes, decentralized erasure codes trade some probability of a successful data retrieval for decentralization. Although theoretical lower bounds on the probability are overwhelming from a theoretical aspect, it is essential to know what the data retrievability is in real applications from a practical aspect. We focus on decentralized erasure code based storage systems and investigate data retrievability from both theoretical and practical aspects. We conduct simulation for random processes of storage systems to evaluate data retrievability. Then we compare simulation results and analytical values from theoretical bounds. By our comparison, we find that data retrievability is underestimated by those bounds. Data retrievability is over 99% in most cases in our simulations, where the order of the used finite field is an 8-bit prime. Data retrievability can be enlarged by using a larger finite field. We believe that data retrievability of decentralized erasure code based storage systems is acceptable for real applications.