We herein propose a MAC protocol for the smart antenna network, which applies pulse/tone exchange prior to the RTS/CTS handshake process. RTS frame collisions are drastically reduced with little additional overhead due to pulse/tone exchange in the proposed protocol. In addition, the number of exposed nodes is reduced by using smart antennas. Furthermore, since the occurrence of the deafness problem can be identified by pulse/tone exchange failure, retransmission is conducted using a fixed contention window value. Therefore, the wastage of wireless resources due to the deafness problem is reduced. As a result, the network throughput can be effectively improved compared with that for previous protocols. Simulation results demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed protocol.