Architecture and evaluation of INGA an inexpensive node for general applications

INGA is a cost-efficient and universal wireless sensor node for activity monitoring and for general applications. INGA´s architecture bases on an 8-bit Atmel microcontroller and runs Contiki OS and TinyOS “out of the box”. The motivation to develop INGA was driven by the need for a reasonable, cheap and expandable node for several use cases: On the one hand, in a research project, we intend to do a gait analysis of elderly persons with it, on the other hand we want to equip our student WSN lab with new nodes. For the first case none of the existing nodes fulfilled our requirements concerning assembled sensors and functionality. In this paper, we present the motivation and design for “yet another sensor node” furthermore, we present the detailed architecture and its benefits in comparison to other nodes. The first measurement results using INGA show its characteristics and usability. INGA is completely under open-source license and all resources are provided to the community.