Patching a patch — Software updates using horizontal patching

This paper presents a method for optimizing incremental updates of consumer electronic devices running multiple applications, called horizontal patching. Instead of using separate deltas for patching different applications, the method generates one delta from the other. Due to the large similarities between the deltas, this horizontal delta is small in size. In all test cases horizontal patching produced smaller deltas, with compression ratios between 8.02% and 43.38%.