A routing protocol is used to facilitate communication in ad hoc network. The primary goal of such a routing protocol is to provide an efficient and reliable path between a pair of nodes. The routing protocols for ad hoc network can be categorized into three categories: table driven, on demand and hybrid routing. The table driven and hybrid routing strategies require periodic exchange of hello messages between nodes of the ad hoc network and thus have high processing and bandwidth requirements. On the other hand on demand routing strategy creates routes when required and hence is very much suitable for ad hoc network. This paper therefore examines the performance of three on demand routing protocols at application layer using QualNet-5.01 simulator.