A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of multi-hop wireless mobile nodes among which the communication is carried out without any centralized control or fixed infrastructure. MANET is a self-organized, self-configurable network having no infrastructure, and in which the mobile nodes move arbitrarily. The wireless link in the network are highly error prone and can go down frequently due to the mobility of nodes, interference and less infrastructure. Hence, because of the highly dynamic environment routing in MANET is a very difficult task. Over the last decade various routing protocols have been proposed for the mobile ad-hoc network and the most important among all of them are AODV, DSR, DSDV and CBRP. This research paper gives the overview of these routing protocols as well as the characteristics and functionality of these routing protocols along with their pros and cons and then make their comparative analysis in order to measure the performance of the network. The main objective of this paper is to compare the performance of all the four routing protocols and then to make the observations about how the performance of these routing protocols can be improved. Performance of these routing protocols are compared on the basis of various parameters such as throughput, delay and packet delivery ratio.