Minimizing the alphabet size of erasure codes with restricted decoding sets

Abstract: A Maximum Distance Separable code over an alphabet $F$ is defined via an encoding function $C:F^k \rightarrow F^n$ that allows to retrieve a message $m \in F^k$ from the codeword $C(m)$ even after erasing any $n-k$ of its symbols. The minimum possible alphabet size of general (non-linear) MDS codes for given parameters $n$ and $k$ is unknown and forms one of the central open problems in coding theory. The paper initiates the study of the alphabet size of codes in a generalized setting where the coding scheme is required to handle a pre-specified subset of all possible erasure patterns, naturally represented by an $n$-vertex $k$-uniform hypergraph. We relate the minimum possible alphabet size of such codes to the strong chromatic number of the hypergraph and analyze the tightness of the obtained bounds for both the linear and non-linear settings. We further consider variations of the problem which allow a small probability of decoding error.