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.

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

Technology Expert

Margaret 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 IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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