VANET is a technology that is used in establishing a connection among moving vehicles and road side units with the help of a wireless medium called dedicated short range communication. VANET is a subpart of Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET). VANET provide applications like road safety, traffic notification and seamless communication between nodes. For these application VANET use different routing protocols. VANET uses wifi, Bluetooth for communication between source and destination nodes and also among intermediate nodes. This paper includes characteristics and challenges of VANET. Various data dissemination protocols are studied separately and their characteristics are observed and on the basis of that observation a tabular comparison of all the protocols is made.