A practical framework for efficient file synchronization

Efficient synchronization of remote copies of files that have experienced insertions and deletions is an important problem with many applications including data storage, file sharing, online editing, and cloud computing. Suppose that user A is the owner of an original file X, and user B is the owner of the edited file Y that is obtained from X through a series of insertions and deletions. In our recent work [1], [2] we developed the first low-complexity two-way protocol between users A and B for synchronizing from a fixed rate of insertions and deletions. This protocol is order-wise optimal and achieves exponentially low probability of the reconstruction error. In this paper, we report on further results, including a description of implementation details of the synchronization protocol and comparisons with existing methods.