multihost-to-host
termnetworking
Many senders converging on one receiver: the many-to-one pattern, also called incast.
It is the shape of a load balancer's back end, a log collector, and a database under fan-in, and it is where congestion is born, because a single link or buffer becomes the meeting point for traffic that left many places at once. Pushed past capacity by design, the same pattern is a distributed denial of service: thousands of hosts aimed at one. Incast collapse in data centers, where synchronized responses overrun a switch buffer, is the benign version of the same physics.
Also known as: many-to-one, incast, N:1