Round Robin Scheduling Algorithm with Example

In this Operating system tutorial, you will learn:

• What is Round-Robin Scheduling?
• Characteristics of Round-Robin Scheduling
• Example of Round-robin Scheduling
• Advantage of Round-robin Scheduling
• Disadvantages of Round-robin Scheduling
• Worst Case Latency

Characteristics of Round-Robin Scheduling

Here are the important characteristics of Round-Robin Scheduling:

• Round robin is a pre-emptive algorithm
• The CPU is shifted to the next process after fixed interval time, which is called time quantum/time slice.
• The process that is preempted is added to the end of the queue.
• Round robin is a hybrid model which is clock-driven
• Time slice should be minimum, which is assigned for a specific task that needs to be processed. However, it may differ OS to OS.
• It is a real time algorithm which responds to the event within a specific time limit.
• Round robin is one of the oldest, fairest, and easiest algorithm.
• Widely used scheduling method in traditional OS.

Example of Round-robin Scheduling

Consider this following three processes

Process Queue	Burst time
P1	4
P2	3
P3	5

Step 1) The execution begins with process P1, which has burst time 4. Here, every process executes for 2 seconds. P2 and P3 are still in the waiting queue.

Step 2) At time =2, P1 is added to the end of the Queue and P2 starts executing

Step 3) At time=4 , P2 is preempted and add at the end of the queue. P3 starts executing.

Step 4) At time=6 , P3 is preempted and add at the end of the queue. P1 starts executing.

Step 5) At time=8 , P1 has a burst time of 4. It has completed execution. P2 starts execution

Step 6) P2 has a burst time of 3. It has already executed for 2 interval. At time=9, P2 completes execution. Then, P3 starts execution till it completes.

Step 7) Let’s calculate the average waiting time for above example.

Wait time 
P1= 0+ 4= 4
P2= 2+4= 6
P3= 4+3= 7

Advantage of Round-robin Scheduling

Here, are pros/benefits of Round-robin scheduling method:

• It doesn’t face the issues of starvation or convoy effect.
• All the jobs get a fair allocation of CPU.
• It deals with all process without any priority
• If you know the total number of processes on the run queue, then you can also assume the worst-case response time for the same process.
• This scheduling method does not depend upon burst time. That’s why it is easily implementable on the system.
• Once a process is executed for a specific set of the period, the process is preempted, and another process executes for that given time period.
• Allows OS to use the Context switching method to save states of preempted processes.
• It gives the best performance in terms of average response time.

Disadvantages of Round-robin Scheduling

Here, are drawbacks/cons of using Round-robin scheduling:

• If slicing time of OS is low, the processor output will be reduced.
• This method spends more time on context switching
• Its performance heavily depends on time quantum.
• Priorities cannot be set for the processes.
• Round-robin scheduling doesn’t give special priority to more important tasks.
• Decreases comprehension
• Lower time quantum results in higher the context switching overhead in the system.
• Finding a correct time quantum is a quite difficult task in this system.

Worst Case Latency

This term is used for the maximum time taken for execution of all the tasks.

• dt = Denote detection time when a task is brought into the list
• st = Denote switching time from one task to another
• et = Denote task execution time

Formula:

Tworst = {(dti+ sti + eti ), + (dti+ sti + eti )2 +...+ (dti+ sti + eti )N., + (dti+ sti + eti  + eti) N} + tISR	
t,SR = sum of all execution times

Summary:

• The name of this algorithm comes from the round-robin principle, where each person gets an equal share of something in turns.
• Round robin is one of the oldest, fairest, and easiest algorithms and widely used scheduling methods in traditional OS.
• Round robin is a pre-emptive algorithm
• The biggest advantage of the round-robin scheduling method is that If you know the total number of processes on the run queue, then you can also assume the worst-case response time for the same process.
• This method spends more time on context switching
• Worst-case latency is a term used for the maximum time taken for the execution of all the tasks.