Round Robin

What Does Round Robin Mean?

Round robin is a process used for network communication and operating system load balancing. A system that works in a round robin fashion distributes load based on the round robin algorithm.

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Techopedia Explains Round Robin

The round robin algorithm uses its scheduling techniques to assign processing time slices and transfer queued data packets. Network devices such as routers and switches implement special round robin algorithm buffer queues, which exist in device memory and store incoming and overloaded data for future processing.

The term is also used in load balancing for servers. For example, a front-end load balancer on a webfarm could distribute Internet traffic among a group of webservers based on a round-robin process.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…