This manuscript provides a model to characterize the energy savings of
network coded storage (NCS) in storage area networks (SANs). We consider
blocking probability of drives as our measure of performance. A mapping
technique to analyze SANs as independent M/G/K/K queues is presented, and
blocking probabilities for uncoded storage schemes and NCS are derived and
compared. We show that coding operates differently than the amalgamation of
file chunks and energy savings are shown to scale well with striping number.

Coding over subsets (known as generations) rather than over all content
blocks in P2P distribution networks and other applications is necessary for a
number of practical reasons such as computational complexity. A cost to pay for
coding only within generations is an overall throughput reduction. It has been
previously shown that allowing contiguous generations to overlap in a
head-to-toe manner improves the throughput.

We consider the problem of distributing a file in a network of storage nodes
whose storage budget is limited but at least equals to the size file. We first
generate $T$ encoded symbols (from the file) which are then distributed among
the nodes. We investigate the optimal allocation of $T$ encoded packets to the
storage nodes such that the probability of reconstructing the file by using any
$r$ out of $n$ nodes is maximized.

We consider large-scale wireless sensor networks with $n$ nodes, out of which
k are in possession, (e.g., have sensed or collected in some other way) k
information packets.