Software-Based Erasure-Tolerant Coding with Buffering and Compression

Erasure-tolerant coding is applied in data storage systems, and also for data transmission to tolerate the loss of data parts due to failures. In the paper we focus on a particular coding variant that we call compressed low-rate code. We report on properties of the code, draw requirements for an implementation, report on the compression results that we reached with our software-based system and provide a model for reliability assessment. A particular result is the necessity of a buffer management for data prior encoding and for the data that is produced in the encoded data streams. Another result is the experimental evaluation of the storage overhead. A predicted overhead reduction by compression could be observed in real-data experiments, nonetheless the lower bound of reduction by compression was not reached.