Investigation of Optimal Data Encoding Parameters Based on User Preference for Cloud Storage

The erasure encoding scheme creates multiple coded data and parity fragments to protect the data from the losses. Nowadays, most storage systems like cloud storage utilize the erasure coding scheme to attain superior data consistency, reliability, and availability. Most of the existing literature focuses on either the cost of recovery or overhead due to the redundant storage without considering the interests of the users, such as high reliability and lower storage cost. We believe that the storage service provider should choose an appropriate encoding scheme with optimal values of two encoding parameters, i.e., data fragments and parity fragments. The values of these encoding parameters depend on the size of the input data and the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the users, such as storage efficiency, availability, and recoverability. These parameters play a crucial role in providing higher reliability and lower storage costs. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate to identify optimal parameters to provide higher reliability and lower storage cost while considering the user's preferences. We present the analysis of the Reed-Solomon coding scheme from the perspective of storage overhead, the probability of data availability, data recoverability, and storage efficiency to identify the optimal values of encoding parameters. We performed the experiments on the Reed-Solomon encoding schemes, and results are reported.