Abstract—The evolution and actual capabilities of sensor-based
technologies concerning miniaturization, processing power and
energy efficiency, together with advances in wireless commu-
nications, enabled the development and wide dissemination of
the so-called wireless body area networks (WBANs) for health
applications. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard, although purposely
designed for these applications, prompts some issues regarding
the schedulability of dynamic traffic as its scheduling services rely
on allocation slots assigned statically and that are hard to modify
at run time. This paper proposes a novel scheduling approach
for this standard, in which the allocation slots are dynamically
scheduled in each beacon period, according to the nodes’ require-
ments, including response to erroneous transmissions of critical
traffic, while allowing co-existence with legacy nodes.