Round robin scheduling is an algorithm mainly used by operating systems and applications that serve multiple clients that request to use resources. It handles all requests in a circular first-in-first-out (FIFO) order and eschews priority so that all processes/applications may be able to use the same resources in the same amount of time and also have the same amount of waiting time each cycle; hence it is also considered as cyclic executive.

It is one of the oldest, simplest, fairest and most widely used scheduling algorithms of all time, partly because it is very easy to implement as there are no complicated timings or priorities to consider, only a FIFO system and a fixed time constraint for each usage of the resource. This also solves the problem of starvation, a problem in which a process is not able to use resources for a long time because it always gets preempted by other processes thought to be more important.