Codes With Availability for Multiple Code Symbols

Codes with availability allow us to access any code symbol simultaneously
$t$
times using
$t$
disjoint recovery sets in distributed data storage. Codes with availability that are studied in the literature provide availability for individual code symbols in the codeword. In this letter, we consider a new class of codes with availability. These codes provide availability
$t$
for subsets of code symbols called multi-symbol sets. For these codes, an upper-bound on the minimum Hamming distance is derived. A construction for optimal codes with information multi-symbol availability is given. The optimal codes with multi-symbol availability allow us to access more symbols locally with the same locality, when compared to optimal codes with individual code symbol availability.