A MAC design for Ku-band mobile wireless mesh network with multi-beam smart antennas is disclosed. This MAC includes an overlay control that separates the collision domain. It also has lower layer CSMA-like scheme. The disclosed design includes an enhanced PCF and an enhanced DCF for two purposes: (1) exploiting multi-beam concurrent communication capability (2) supporting QoS and mission-based communications. An efficient time synchronization scheme is also disclosed to ensure all beams can concurrently send data to the star node. Finally, ARMA or HMM based prediction schemes are disclosed to predict future traffic profile in each beam. This helps the star node to better prepare the queue content and schedule information.