Round-robin scheduling
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Round-robin is one of the simplest scheduling algorithms for processes in an operating system, which assigns time slices to each process in equal portions and in order, handling all processes as having the same priority. Round-robin scheduling is both simple and easy to implement, and starvation-free. Round-robin scheduling can also be applied to other scheduling problems, such as network scheduling.
In wireless networks, where many stations share one channel, this algorithm provides every station to transmit or receive on the shared channel at a regular interval. This may make Round Robin to appear a fair algorithm. However, because it is much less efficient than the Proportionally-Fair algorithm, it hardly will provide very good service to the subscribers. The network operator will also suffer reduced capacity of the network. The main reason for this is that this algorithm does not take into account the changing reception conditions at the different receivers and thus it will schedule transmissions to/from subscribers half of the time when their reception conditions are worse than average. In contrast to this, the Proportionally-Fair scheduling will schedule transmissions every time to/from all subscribers when the reception conditions are well above the average.
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.