Events Calendar

Codes for Reliability and Security in Distributed Storage Systems

Speaker: Salim El Rouayheb, Princeton University

Talk Title: Codes for Reliability and Security in Distributed Storage Systems

Abstract: Distributed storage systems are now a growing paradigm for providing online storage of data and making it accessible anywhere and anytime. Such services are now being commercially offered by data centers, such as those run by Google and Amazon, and peer-to-peer (p2p) systems such as Wuala. These systems rely on large distributed networks of individually unreliable commodity nodes to reliably store the data. At this high level of scale and distributivity, new questions arise in terms of understanding the fundamental theoretical tradeoffs among the different system resources (storage, bandwidth, disk I/O, latency, energy, computational complexity, etc.) in order to meet a targeted level of data availability and security.

In this talk, I will answer some of these questions and present new efficient codes for distributed storage that we call Distributed Replication-based Exact Simple Storage (DRESS) codes. DRESS codes permit fast system repair and growth with minimum bandwidth, disk reads, and computational cost at the price of a minimal storage overhead. I will present optimal code constructions from projective planes and Steiner systems and describe simple randomized constructions based on balls-and-bins models. I will also discuss fundamental information theoretic bounds for protecting the data confidentiality and integrity in distributed storage systems in the face of eavesdroppers and malicious adversaries.

Biography: Salim El Rouayheb is an associate research scholar at the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Wireless Foundations (WiFo) Lab at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department, University of California, Berkeley (2010-2011). His research interests lie in the broad area of communications with a focus on distributed storage systems, network coding, and information-theoretic security.



He received his Diploma degree in electrical engineering from the Lebanese University, Roumieh, Lebanon, in 2002, and his M.S. degree in computer and communications engineering from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, in 2004. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2009. During Summer 2006, he was an intern at the Mathematics of Communication Research Department at Bell Labs. He was awarded the Charlie S. Korban award for outstanding graduate student, and the Texas Telecommunication Engineering Consortium (TXTEC) Graduate Fellowship.

Host: Andreas Molisch, x04670, molisch@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos