Abstract
The IEEE 802.15.6 standard emerged as the most suitable standard that fits the special requirements of wireless body area networks. It provides flexibility to designers by recommending the use of several medium access control layer techniques, but does not specify how to combine some or all these recommended techniques to form the most efficient wireless body area network medium access control for a specific scenario. Our goal here is to design a wireless body area network medium access control that provides an optimal combination of these basic techniques that are available in the standard, by taking into consideration the variability and heterogeneity of the sensors. The performance of the proposed techniques is evaluated using some of the standard performance measures such as throughput, delay, and energy consumption.