With the rapid deployment of the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and distribution automation (DA), self-healing has become a key factor to enhance the resilience of distribution networks. Following a permanent fault occurrence, the distribution network operator (DNO) implements the self-healing scheme to locate and isolate the fault and to restore power supply to out-of-service portions. As an essential component of self-healing, service restoration has attracted considerable attention. This paper mainly reviews the service restoration approaches of distribution networks, which requires communication systems. The service restoration approaches can be classified as centralized, distributed, and hierarchical approaches according to the communication architecture. In these approaches, different techniques are used to obtain service restoration solutions, including heuristic rules, expert systems, meta-heuristic algorithms, graph theory, mathematical programming, and multi-agent systems. Moreover, future research areas of service restoration for distribution networks are discussed.