Repairing Reed–Solomon Codes Evaluated on Subspaces

We consider the repair problem for Reed–Solomon (RS) codes, evaluated on an Fq-linear subspace U ⊆ Fqm of dimension d, where q is a prime power, m is a positive integer, and Fq is the Galois field of size q. For q > 2, we show the existence of a linear repair scheme for the RS code of length n = qd and codimension qs, s < d, evaluated on U, in which each of the n-1 surviving nodes transmits only r symbols of Fq, provided that ms ≥ d(m - r). For the case q = 2, we prove a similar result, with some restrictions on the evaluation linear subspace U. Our proof is based on a probabilistic argument, however the result is not merely an existence result; the success probability is fairly large (at least 1/3) and there is a simple criterion for checking the validity of the randomly chosen linear repair scheme. Our result extend the construction of Dau–Milenkovic to the range r < m - s, for a wide range of parameters.