The stable topology and high-capacity and high-speed performance of Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) in mine emergency communication system put forward new requirements for the design of routing protocols. In order to get a WMN routing protocol more suitable for mine emergency, three types of routing protocols, active routing protocol, on-demand routing protocol and hybrid routing protocol, were classified and elaborated. Furthermore, the performance of AODV, AOMDV and HWMP were introduced and the common improvement measures were reviewed from various aspects. For the issue of network utilization, the balance strategy of energy consumption was employed to improve the performance. For the issue of high routing overhead, the movement mechanism between nodes were optimized to reduce energy consumption. For the issue of link interference, assignment of node task queues and prevention of network hotspots were used to improve the link interference. The results show that the AODV routing protocol has more advantages than other protocols. At last, the future research directions were prospected from the aspects of Mesh network management and improvement of link failure, data confidentiality and other routing issues.