  Current advances in wireless communication, microelectronics, semiconductor
technologies, and intelligent sensors have contributed to the development of
unobtrusive WBANs. These networks provide long term health monitoring of
patients without any constraint in their normal activities. Traditional MAC
protocols do not accommodate the assorted WBAN traffic requirements in a power
efficient manner. In this paper, we present a brief discussion on the
development process of a low power MAC protocol for WBANs. We observe the
behavior of a beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 for on-body sensor networks. We
further propose a low power technique called traffic based wakeup mechanism for
a WBAN that exploits the traffic patterns of the BAN Nodes to ensure power
efficient and reliable communication.
