What is the name of multithreading design pattern that uses asynchronous requests instead of synchronization with mutexes?

I'm wondering what is an "official" name for the design pattern where you have a single thread that actually handles some resource (database, file, communication interface, network connection, log, ...) and other threads that wish to do something with that resource have to pass a message to this thread and - optionally - wait for a notification about completion?

I've found some articles that refer to this method as "Central Controller", but googling doesn't give much about that particular phrase.

One the other hand this is not exactly a "message pump" or "event queue", because it's not related to GUI or the operating system passing some messages to the application.

It's also not "work queue" or "thread pool", as this single thread is dedicated only to this single activity (managing single resource), not meant to be used to do just about anything that is thrown at it.

For example assume that there's a special communication interface managed by one thread (for example let that be Modbus, but this really doesn't matter). This interface is completely hidden inside an object with it's thread and a message queue. This object has member functions that allow to "read" or "write" data using that communication interface, and these functions can be used by multiple threads without any special synchronization. That's because internally the code of these function converts the arguments to a message/request and passes that via the queue to the handler thread, which just serves these requests one at a time.

This design pattern may be used instead of explicit synchronization with a mutex protecting the shared resource, which would have to be locked/unlocked by each thread that wishes to interact with that resource.