Once a connection to an AMQP broker has been established, the client must create a channel to communicate to the broker. A channel is a bi-directional connection between an AMQP client and an AMQP broker. AMQP is multi-channeled, which means that channels are multiplexed over a single network socket connection. Channels are light-weight and consume little resources, and therefore used in AMQP's exception handling mechanism—channels are closed when an exception occurs.

``` java

private AmqpChannel publishChannel = null;