Commercial provisioning of file synchronization services (FSS) relies entirely on protocols that utilize a remote central server that is often located in the cloud to host important files. Updates at user computers are propagated to the central server and from the central server to other sources in need of such updates. Therefore, a synchronization operation between two computers located on the same network often results in file data transmission to and from this local network at least twice. This introduces an unnecessary bandwidth usage on a user’s local network and has become an issue, especially since there is an increase in the demands for internet resources.

This thesis work presents a new file synchronization protocol towards FSS known as LAPSync (location-aware protocol for remote file synchronization). This paper also proposes a hierarchical synchronization mechanism by utilizing LAPSync. Our proposed solution relies on the ability of LAPSync clients to acquire knowledge about the location of clients participating in the synchronization operation to construct a hierarchical synchronization path. Finally, we implement our protocol into a prototype and conduct experiments to compare with drop-box (a popular file synchronization service). The results obtained show that LAPSync offers a reduction in bandwidth usage when the files to be synchronized exist on the same local network