Title: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Deduplication,
Abstract: Deduplication finds and removes long-range data duplicates. It is commonly
used in cloud and enterprise server settings and has been successfully applied
to primary, backup, and archival storage. Despite its practical importance as a
source-coding technique, its analysis from the point of view of information
theory is missing. This paper provides such an information-theoretic analysis
of data deduplication. It introduces a new source model adapted to the
deduplication setting. It formalizes the two standard fixed-length and
variable-length deduplication schemes, and it introduces a novel multi-chunk
deduplication scheme. It then provides an analysis of these three deduplication
variants, emphasizing the importance of boundary synchronization between source
blocks and deduplication chunks. In particular, under fairly mild assumptions,
the proposed multi-chunk deduplication scheme is shown to be order optimal.