Why can't routers recover?

I'm just curious why cheap routers can't recover from a network hiccup, while better routers or ad-hoc networks can?

I think the keyword is "cheap"

Yes, but why? Don't they just relay information? I don't see why a $40 linksys router requires you to unplug it and plug it back in while a $150 Airport Extreme will recover on it's own.

a decent network stack is hard to do, and requires a fair bit of error handling
handling malformed packets, error correction to reconstruct a packet sequence if one packet happens to have been dropped, etc. etc.

With limited resources on embedded systems, memory and processing power are expensive

You can fudge a TCP/IP stack, and leave out a lot of stuff
meaning less memory and less computing power is required

It's far more fragile, and unexpected circumstances can confuse the system, but it is cheaper

Lol.

I have a 30$ D-Link router, and it always recovers just fine

xP