  Coded computation is a framework which provides redundancy in distributed
computing systems to speed up largescale tasks. Although most existing works
assume an error-free scenarios in a master-worker setup, the link failures are
common in current wired/wireless networks. In this paper, we consider the
straggler problem in coded distributed computing with link failures, by
modeling the links between the master node and worker nodes as packet erasure
channels. When the master fails to detect the received signal, retransmission
is required for each worker which increases the overall run-time to finish the
task. We first investigate the expected overall run-time in this setting using
an (n; k) maximum distance separable (MDS) code. We obtain the lower and upper
bounds on the latency in closed-forms and give guidelines to design MDS code
depending on the packet erasure probability. Finally, we consider a setup where
the number of retransmissions is limited due to the bandwidth constraint. By
formulating practical optimization problems related to latency, transmission
bandwidth and probability of successful computation, we obtain achievable
performance curves as a function of packet erasure probability.
