In a wireless body area network (WBAN), wireless biomedical sensors are placed around, on, or inside the human body. Given specific requirements, WBANs can significantly improve healthcare, diagnostic monitoring, and other medical services. However, the existing standards such as IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 have some limitations to meet all the requirements of WBANs. Many medium access control (MAC) protocols have been studied so far, most of which are derived from the IEEE 802.15.4 superframe structure with some improvements and adjustments. However, the MAC protocols do not provide the required quality of service (QoS) for various types of traffic in a WBAN. In this paper, a traffic-aware MAC (TA-MAC) protocol for WBANs is proposed, in which time slots are dynamically allocated on the basis of traffic priority, providing the required QoS. According to the performance evaluation results, the proposed TA-MAC is better than IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and the conventional priority-based MAC in terms of transmission time, system throughput, energy efficiency, and collision ratio.
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