In this paper, we provide a survey of energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless body area networks (WBANs). The bottleneck of WBAN is the MAC protocols which are designed to achieve high reliability, energy minimization, low power consumption and reduction of latency. For this purpose, different approaches and techniques of energy-efficient MAC protocols like Low Power Listening (LPL), Schedule Contention, PCM, Duty Cycling, CDMA & TDMA are elaborated due to their significance in solving issues of energy dissipation, traffic control mechanisms for collision avoidance and power consumptions, etc. The survey suggests that there are so many techniques employed to make WBANS energy efficient like LPL, schedule and contention and TDMA. However, the web layer, physical layer, and radio frequency communication need to be considered for energy minimization.

Keywords— Energy Efficiency, Medium Access Control Protocols, Wireless Body Area Network