Multi-hop wireless networks or ad-hoc networks face several limiting characteristics that make it difficult to support a multitude of applications. It is in this context that we find smart antennas to find significant applications in these networks, owing to their ability to alleviate most of these limitations. The focus of my research is thus to investigate the use of smart antennas in ad-hoc networks and hence efficiently design network protocols that best leverage their capabilities in communication. There are two parts to the proposed objective of designing efficient network protocols that pertain to the nature of the smart antenna network considered, namely, homogeneous and heterogeneous smart antenna networks. Unlike heterogeneous smart antenna networks, where different devices in the network employ different antenna technologies, homogeneous smart antenna networks consist of devices employing the same antenna technology. Further, in homogeneous smart antenna networks, different antenna technologies operating in different strategies tend to perform the best in different network architectures, conditions and application requirements. This motivates the need for developing a {em unified} framework for designing efficient communication (medium access control and routing) protocols for homogeneous smart antenna networks in general. With the objective of designing such a unified framework, we start by designing efficient MAC and routing protocols for the most sophisticated of the smart antenna technologies, namely multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) links. The capabilities of MIMO links form a super-set of those possible with other antenna technologies. Hence, the insights gained from the design of communication protocols for MIMO links are then used to develop unified MAC and routing frameworks for smart antennas in general. For heterogeneous smart antenna networks, we develop theoretical performance bounds by studying the impact of increasing degree of heterogeneity on network throughput performance. Given that the antenna technologies are already unified in the network, unified solutions are not required. However, we do develop efficient MAC and routing protocols to best leverage the available heterogeneous capabilities present in the network. We also design efficient cooperation strategies that will further help the communication protocols in exploiting the available heterogeneous capabilities in the network to the best possible extent.