round robin scheduling

A Round Robin preemptive scheduling example with quantum=3.

Round-robin (RR) is one of the algorithms employed by process and network schedulers in computing. As the term is generally used, time slices (also known as time quanta) are assigned to each process in equal portions and in circular order, handling all processes without priority (also known as cyclic executive). Round-robin scheduling is simple, easy to implement, and starvation-free. Round-robin scheduling can be applied to other scheduling problems, such as data packet scheduling in computer networks. It is an operating system concept.

The name of the algorithm comes from the round-robin principle known from other fields, where each person takes an equal share of something in turn.