随着新业务和新应用的不断推出，传统路由器在业务升级能力及升级响应速度方面已不能满足网络发展的需求。实时电路重构技术利用可编程器件可多次重复配置逻辑状态的特性，能够在系统运行时根据需要动态地改变系统的电路结构，利用可重构技术实现的路由器能够支持新业务模块的硬件电路在芯片内动态加载，同时又不影响其他功能模块的正常运行，为传统路由器功能扩展能力差问题提供了解决思路。在介绍可重构技术的基本概念和支撑器件的当前发展概况后，对以往的可重构路由器技术和当前的研究现状进行了总结，并从构建可重构网络的角度分析了进一步的研究方向。

Today, with new services and applications blooming on the internet, to enable traditional routers to offer enough capability and speed of upgrade along with these services and applications in time would become even harder than ever. Run-time reconfiguration (RTR), based on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), is a new promising technology that can configure the partial or total hardware logic resources of a system at run time. Based on the technology, reconfigurable routers can support dynamic reconfiguration of new hardware logic for the new service, while keeping the other services still run properly, hence can provide a new possible solution to the update problem of the traditional routers. After introducing the basic concepts of RTR and the current development of the FPGA, this paper summarizes the past major research efforts with respect to the reconfigurable router, as well as the current work on it. Research directions and open problems are also discussed from the point of view of reconfigurable network.