Traffic Adaptive MAC Protocols in Wireless Body Area Networks

Table 1

Comparative analysis of traffic adaptive MAC protocols.

Categorization	Protocol	Characteristics
		Goal	DAT	TLC	Delay	PDR	Energy Cons.	Strength	Weakness
TLE based	ATLAS (2011)	To reduce energy consumption and delay, increase packet delivery ratio	Yes	Yes	Low	High	Low	Improve energy efficiency and throughput	Traffic prioritization is ignored
	PLA-MAC (2013)	To achieve energy efficiency with prioritization based traffic load awareness	Yes	Yes	Low	High	High	Reduce delay and increase PDR	Ignore diverse traffic loads
	MDTA-MAC (2014)	To improve energy with low delay with traffic load management	Yes	Yes	High	Medium	Low	Improve energy efficiency and PDR	Delay increases due to increase in traffic load
AWI based	TAD-MAC (2012)	To improve energy efficiency with traffic adaptive approach	Yes	No	NC	NC	Low	Improve energy efficiency	Inappropriate for WBANs due to its preamble-based approach
	TaMAC (2012)	To improve energy efficiency and QoS for diverse traffic with low delay	Yes	No	High	NC	Medium	Improve energy efficiency	Time-critical traffic is delayed by the wake-up response signal and beacon sending time
	HS-MAC (2016)	To improve energy efficiency by using traffic-based adaptive wake-up Interval	Yes	No	Low	Low	Medium	Improve energy efficiency with low delay	Packet loss ratio is increased in the worst case
ATSA based	LDTA-MAC (2011)	To reduce delay and power consumption with the management of diverse traffic loads	Yes	No	Low	High	Low	Adaptive slot allocation based on traffic load	Fixed CAP reduces energy efficiency during low load and throughput during high load
	CA-MAC (2013)	To improve energy efficiency and to reduce delay with real-time diverse traffic management	Yes	No	Low	High	Medium	Reduce delay and improve PDR	No traffic load estimation
	Stat-MAC (2013)	To improve energy efficiency with low delay by providing a scheme for the retransmission of lost messages during inactive period	Yes	No	Medium	NC	Low	Improve energy efficiency	Experiment based on two sensor nodes and delay increases by the increment in timeline(s)
	CAC-MAC (2013)	To achieve energy efficiency with prioritization traffic load based resource allocation	Yes	No	Medium	Medium	Low	Improve energy efficiency	No traffic load estimation
	Ada-MAC (2015)	To reduce packet loss ratio and packet collision ratio with the adjustment of dynamic traffic loads	Yes	No	Medium	Medium	NC	Reduce delay and improve PDR	Multiple queues for diverse traffic prioritization is not a practical approach for WBANs
	CoR-MAC (2016)	To reduce the transmission delay of emergency data	Yes	No	Low	High	Low	Reduce data delivery delay and shows better delay performance that is improved from 50%–85%	The average delay of non-time-critical data increases by the increasing number of nodes

DAT = dynamic adjustment of traffic, TLC = Traffic Load Calculation, PDR = packet delivery ratio, and NC = Not Considered.