A Field Size Bound and Constructions of Maximally Recoverable Codes with Hierarchical Locality

Codes with locality are a class of codes which minimize the number of nodes accessed to repair a failed node. These codes can be used to handle single and multiple erasures. In an extension, codes with hierarchical locality have been proposed, which offer multiple levels of locality as the number of erasure increase. Given the constraints imposed by locality, maximally recoverable codes (MRC) are a class of codes which allow for recoverability from all information theoretically recoverable erasure patterns. In this work, we consider MRC for the case of codes with hierarchical locality. We derive a field size lower bound on MRC with hierarchical locality. We also give constructions of MRC with hierarchical locality for some parameters, whose field size is smaller than that of earlier known constructions.