Reactive routing protocols are gaining popularity due to their event driven nature day by day. In this vary paper, reactive routing is studied precisely. Route request, route reply and route maintenance phases are modeled with respect to control overhead. Control overhead varies with respect to change in various parameters. Our model calculates these variations as well. Besides modeling, we chose three most favored reactive routing protocols as Ad-Hoc on Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Dynamic MANET on Demand (DYMO) for our experiments. We simulated these protocols using ns-2 for a detailed comparison and performance analysis with respect to mobility and scalability issues keeping metrics of throughput, route delay and control over head. Their performances and comparisons are extensively presented in last part of our work.