Integrating Safety in VANETs: A Taxonomy and Systematic Review of VEINS Models

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) play an essential role in road safety through Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communications. In this paper, we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art literature about VEINS tool set which is an extraordinary vehicle and network simulation framework for VANET researchers. This paper identifies and classifies the existing research into a comprehensive taxonomy that we called Applications, Solutions and Networks so as to provide an organized survey of safety-related VEINS-based literature. This review can be used by the research community to understand where gaps exist in the literature of particular real-world applicability or integration with emerging technologies, as well as socio-economic factors associated with deployment of VEINS-based safety applications. In addition, we evaluate the VEINS framework including what it provides (e.g., better simulation accuracy), safety testing is more comprehensive as well as other technologies that are used may have like in our case 5G and AI. We also refer to its affordability, growth-ability and adaptiveness along with real-time data analytics commented the author. The constraints of VEINS are also discussed, for instance the bridge from simulation to reality, computational complexity and problems with regard to emerging technologies integration. We discuss future research directions to further enrich the potential of VEINS by incorporating Beyond-5G technologies, cutting-edge AI algorithms, blockchain (BC) for communication security and reliability, semi-virtual/hybrid simulation environments and a wider range of V2X communications. It includes case studies and applications which illustrate how general safety scenarios (e.g., collision avoidance, emergency vehicle prioritization), road hazard detection can be simulated using VEINS highlighting the importance of this approach for practicing engineers. In all, the wide-ranging review would be useful to researchers and practitioners working toward ensuring a secure and efficient vehicular network design.