Patent ID: 7079051

Claim:
A method for differential compression of a body of data S with respect to a body of data T, comprising the steps of: initializing a sliding window W of size MAX{m,n}+K so that its rightmost m characters are S, where K is an integer such that 0≦K<MIN{m,n}; performing sliding window compression of T with window W, to produce a sequence of pointers, where each of said pointers represents a single character or represents a copy of an earlier substring of T or represents a copy of a substring of S, such that at least one of said pointers represents a copy of a substring of S; transmitting each pointer of said sequence of pointers to a utilization device that contains a copy of S; upon receiving each of said pointers at said utilization device, performing an additional sliding window decoding step in the recovery of T, in such a way that the size of the memory used is no more than MAX{m,n}+K, and such that after the last pointer is received T is fully recovered.