A medium access control (MAC) duty cycling is carried out in a body area network (BAN). The duty cycling includes sending a wake-up (WUP) message from a sender node to one or more target receiver nodes when a wireless medium of the BAN is free (S510) determining if at least one target receiver node responded with a READY message during a sniff time interval of the sender node (S520) determining if a number of WUP messages transmitted by the sender node exceeds a predefined threshold when the READY message was not received (S540) and setting the sender node to operate in a TURN mode when the number of WUP messages exceeded the predefined threshold (S550).
