Multiple access schemes are natural not only in communication
systems but also in many other systems such
as computer systems, storage facilities, or servers of any
kind, where resources are shared by a number of nodes. In
this article we address mainly shared communication
channels.
The goal of this article is to survey typical examples of
multiple access schemes. These examples include TDMA,
FDMA, Aloha, polling, and tree‐based schemes. The allocated
space for the topic of multiple access schemes in the
encyclopedia (which is yet another shared resource) is just
too tiny to include all the ingenious multiple access
schemes that have been designed by researchers over
the years.