The term “mobile” is termed as moving and “Ad hoc” is termed as a temporary network without any centralized administration or permanent infrastructure. Because of the dynamic MANET topology, this review is mainly concentrated on diverse routing techniques that are considered as the main challenges these days. A variety of strategies has been given for the effective routing for providing the enhanced performance. Different routing protocols have been presented for MANET that makes its hard to decide which protocol is appropriate for different network conditions. This paper gives an overview of MANET with its applications and characteristics, its routing protocols, attacks and its performance parameters.