Repeated-root Constacyclic Codes with Optimal Locality

Abstract

A code is called a locally repairable code (LRC) if any code symbol is a function of a small fraction of other code symbols. When a locally repairable code is employed in a distributed storage systems, an erased symbol can be recovered by accessing only a small number of other symbols, and hence alleviating the network resources required during the repair process. In this paper we consider repeated-root constacyclic codes, which is a generalization of cyclic codes, that are optimal with respect to a Singleton-like bound on minimum distance. An LRC with the structure of a constacyclic code can be encoded efficiently using any encoding algorithm for constacyclic codes in general. In this paper we obtain optimal LRCs among these repeated-root constacyclic codes. Several infinite classes of optimal LRCs over a fixed alphabet are found. Under a further assumption that the ambient space of the repeated-root constacyclic codes is a chain ring, we show that there is no other optimal LRC.