What does the term multiplexing mean in computer science?

Question

What does multiplexing mean (in it's abstract form)? I understand you have 'multiplexers' in hardware and 'muxing' in networks. What would a good high-level definition be?

Answer 1

Since the definition is basically 'the doing of multiple things at the same time' or 'interleaving of many things'. I would suggest it's as simple as that when applied to computer science.

Though are are specific instances of multiplexers such as putting multiple signals through a data channel, other words in computer science may also be used to replace multiplexer. For example you could consider the running of many processes as multiplexing but the more common term is multiprocessing.

However the hardware/software example of many signals over a wire/channel is the canonical example for me.

There's a nice definition here - .../wiki/multiplex.

Answer 2

Multiplexing is a process to combine multiple signal for transmit it over a single channel.multiplexing is sending multiple signal or stream of information on a carrier at the same time in the form of a single, complex signal and then recovering the separate signals at the receiving ends..

Answer 3

Multiplexing, in computer networking, refers to a technique whereby multiple users share the bandwidth of a channel. You could use the analogy of a postal service, whereby different people(senders/transmitters) use one postal office (the channel/ medium) to send letters to their loved ones (receivers).

Two famous forms of multiplexing are Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM). TDM is whereby the channel regulates the senders such that only one sender can send a message at any one time using the networks full capacity/ bandwidth. After some time interval, the next sender can send, and this process repeats for all senders. Therefore in our analogy, the Sender A has one hour to send letters, and the postal service personell will use their full resources to deliver the letters to their respective recipients. In FDM, all senders can use the network bandwidth the whole time, but will be limited because there are multiple users at the same time and therefore delivery could take a little longer. Back to our analogy, Sender A sends sends a letter but the post office has other letters as well from other senders, therefore the delivery will take longer.

Depending on how you see it, either of them could be faster than the other. But like I said before, there are other types of multiplexing as well so it is not confined to the two ways I described above. I hope this makes sense to you.