An Economical Distributed Design of a Hardware Based Router

In this document we present distributed a design for the implementation of hardware based router. The main target is to build a cheap and efficient multi-port 10 Mpbs router using an assortment of PIC micro-controllers. The design is suitably distributed to ensure equivalent load on all the modules of the design. Another quality of the design is its fault tolerance and the ability to operate to some extent even if some modules become non-functional. Our approach of using several relatively cheap micro-controllers over one single expensive high end processors reduces the cost of routers by more than five times. Every module of our router is fully programmable and configurable. Debugging is also easy since every module supports serial transmission.