A Practical Study of Network Coding in Distributed Storage Systems

Highly increased data traffic over the last few years has led to a need to improve the networkefficiency. One way to achieve this is by network coding. In this thesis two codes, namelyreplication code and regenerating codes, have been examined. Most other works in this area hasbeen theoretical, so we created a testbed to perform practical tests. Then these practical resultsare compared to the theoretical results with varying finite field size. It will be shown that thepractical studies verify the theoretical work. Furthermore, we observe the probability ofsuccessful repair after several stages of repair. More so, the achievability of exact repair of a failed node in a tandem network has beenexamined. This has been proven possible, and also the required finite field size is presented.Another issue at focus is the number of transfers required to achieve exact repair in such anetwork. The results show that 2*k transfers is required, which is comparable to functionalrepair