Charged particle pseudorapidity distributions from SPS to LHC

Pseudorapidity distributions of charged particles produced in heavy ion collisions are a powerful tool to characterize the global properties of the created system. They have been measured in a wide range of energies at the GSI, AGS, SPS and RHIC accelerators and will be one of the first measurements at ALICE at the LHC. The various analysis techniques developed by SPS and RHIC experiments are reviewed and the presently available results from SPS and RHIC are presented, focusing in particular on the scaling of charged particle yield with centrality and with center-of-mass energy. Finally the perspectives for the multiplicity measurement in the ALICE experiment at the LHC are discussed.