A Family of Optimal Locally Recoverable Codes

A code over a finite alphabet is called locally recoverable (LRC) if every symbol in the encoding is a function of a small number (at most r ) other symbols. We present a family of LRC codes that attain the maximum possible value of the distance for a given locality parameter and code cardinality. The codewords are obtained as evaluations of specially constructed polynomials over a finite field, and reduce to a Reed-Solomon code if the locality parameter r is set to be equal to the code dimension. The size of the code alphabet for most parameters is only slightly greater than the code length. The recovery procedure is performed by polynomial interpolation over r points. We also construct codes with several…