Network on Chip(NoC) is an efficient communication fabric for multi-core systems. As on-chip core count increases, area and power consumed by NoCs have to be considered seriously. Enhancing performance of NoCs under strict area and power budgets is of practical concern. In this paper, we propose CAERUS, a low-cost router that incorporates a novel arbitration policy that balances the opportunities to inject its and an optimized ejection policy. Experimental results show that CAERUS reduces traversal latency of the its in the network and sustain the throughput at higher injection rates as compared to existing low-cost router designs. The area and power expenditures are comparable to existing low cost router architectures. Copyright © 2014 ACM.