A term that refers to the effective method of bandwidth sharing that packet switched networks exhibit. In a packet switched network, data is transmitted using the full-bandwidth of the link in strict order of arrival. Thus, unlike FDM or TDM, the actual frame position of the datagrams that belong to a given communication channel can only be stated using statistical probabilities (e.g. if there are two channels using the same link then at a given time, you'd expect channel A to be using the link 50% of the time and channel B the other 50%). At a given time you cannot predict which channel is using the link, whereas for TDM, channel A's frames will always be in the same position in the sequence and for FDM they will always be using a specified frequency band.

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