A Comprehensive Survey on Vehicular Networking: Communications, Applications, Challenges, and Upcoming Research Directions

Nowadays, advanced communication technologies are being utilized to develop intelligent transportation management and driving assistance. Through the ability to exchange traffic and infotainment information between road infrastructure and vehicles, vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) promise to improve transport efficiency, accident prevention, and pedestrians comfort. The deployment of VANETs in the real world is based on the message's correctness and timely delivery and assuredness of privacy protection and data security. In this regard, many researchers have conducted surveys and studies that present models and solutions related to the improvement of VANET from different aspects such as architectural design, networking, and data security. Motivated by these influences, this study presents a detailed survey of VANETs to provide a complete picture of particular VANET applications, networking, and challenges. None of them collected all data in one survey. VANET communication techniques and their improvements are the focus of this study. The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, a complete taxonomy of VANET wireless access techniques has been provided based on various parameters. Second, a detailed discussion and classification VANET services and applications are provided. Third, the challenges related to VANET according to the applicability area, data networking, and resource management are explored in detail. Based on this classification, a complete description of the challenges for each category, including the proposed solutions and development models, is provided to overcome such challenges. Finally, the integration of evolutionary technologies with VANET is comprehensively presented. In this regard, a thorough explanation is provided for each technology, including the challenges, solutions, and suggestions for further improvements. This study enables various users working in the vehicular networking domain to select one of the proposals based on its relative advantages.