To make it feasible to service many more nodes than eight on a single channel, ANT has a channel option called shared. Just as the name indicates many receiver nodes share the same channel and are managed by the collection node that in this case acts as a master. The sharing takes place when the master sends a message during the regular message period and all slaves share in receiving the message. Within that message is a sixteen bit address that occupies the first two bytes of the standard eight byte ANT packet. Only the slave that is configured to the transmitted address responds. This address is known to the master and is used to individually select the slave the master wants to communicate with. The master will then move to another address based upon a polling order established by the application.