Multi-dimensional Hamming Coding for Data Safety

As physical devices serving for data storage age, the stored data suffer gradual degradation, which is a process colloquially called the bit-rot. In order to remedy this degradation, the data is being encoded with redundancy. The first encoding scheme capable of correcting errors in data was the Hamming code. In its original form, the Hamming code is capable of correcting only one error in the sequence of bits within the encoded block of data. In this work, an extension of Hamming coding capable of successfully correcting multiple errors has been described. The method involves arranging the data in a multi-dimensional array, with Hamming coding being applied along each dimension. This way, each bit of data is being protected multiple times, and thus is more resistant to bit-rot. The performance of this novel encoding scheme has been compared to the performance of the original Hamming coding method. For this, trials have been made with data arranged in three dimensions, encoded by three-dimensional Hamming code, and the results issuing from the trials have been presented and discussed.