  Motivated by applications in distributed storage, the notion of a locally
recoverable code (LRC) was introduced a few years back. In an LRC, any
coordinate of a codeword is recoverable by accessing only a small number of
other coordinates. While different properties of LRCs have been well-studied,
their performance on channels with random erasures or errors has been mostly
unexplored. In this paper, we analyze the performance of LRCs over such
stochastic channels. In particular, for input-symmetric discrete memoryless
channels, we give a tight characterization of the gap to Shannon capacity when
LRCs are used over the channel. Our results hold for a general notion of LRCs
that correct multiple local erasures.
