Piping Patterns: Multiplexing and Demultiplexing

There’s a particular variation of the merge stream pattern in which we don’t really want to just join multiple streams together but, instead, use a shared channel to deliver the data of a set of streams. This is a conceptually different operation because the source streams remain logically separated inside the shared channel, which allows us to split the stream again once the data reaches the other end of the shared channel. The illustration given below clarifies this situation.