This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE JOURNAL ON EMERGING AND SELECTED TOPICS IN CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS 1 TAD-MAC: Traffic-Aware Dynamic MAC Prot

Abstract—A wireless body area sensor network (WBASN) de-mands ultra low power and energy efficient protocols. Medium access control (MAC) layer plays a pivotal role for energy man-agement in WBASN. Moreover, idle listening is the dominant en-ergy waste in most of the MAC protocols. WBASN exhibits wide range of traffic variations based on different physiological data emanating from the monitored patient. For example, electrocar-diogram data rate is multiple times more in comparison with body temperature rate. In this context, we propose a novel energy effi-cient traffic-aware dynamic (TAD) MAC protocol for WBASN. The protocol relies on dynamic adaptation of wake-up interval based on a traffic status register bank. The proposed technique allows the wake-up interval to converge to a steady state for fixed and variable traffic rates, which results in optimized energy consumption. A comparison with other energy efficient protocols for three different widely used radio chips i.e., , , and is presented. The results show that TAD-MAC outperforms all the other protocols under fixed and variable traffic rates. Finally, life-time of a WBASN was estimated and found to be 3–6 times better than other protocols. Index Terms—Adaptive algorithm, dynamic MAC protocol, traffic-aware MAC protocol, traffic status register, wireless body area sensor networks, wireless sensor networks