Recent years have been brought a host of cryptographic schemes that make use of pairings. Pairing based schemes have been designed for various applications that have certain advantages over conventional RSA or discrete logarithm based encryption schemes. The concept of pairing was first introduced by Andre Weil in 1940. It plays an important role in the theoretical study of the arithmetic of elliptic curves and Abelian varieties. It has also recently become extremely useful in cryptologic constructions related to these objects. The present paper consists of brief survey on pairing based schemes in cryptography. The survey reviews the pairings mathematically and it includes the topics namely pairing-friendly elliptic curves. It also includes a brief introduction to existing identity-based encryption (IBE) schemes and other cryptographic schemes using pairing technology.