https://journals.tultech.eu/index.php/jtse <p><strong>Journal of Transactions in Systems Engineering (JTSE)</strong> is an open-access and peer-reviewed journal that provides the latest research and developments in all theoretical and practical aspects and fields of engineering applications, informatics, and engineering systems design. The journal publishes three times a year (January, June, and October). All the content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the DOAJ and BOAI definition of open access..</p> TULTECH en-US Journal of Transactions in Systems Engineering 2806-2973 https://journals.tultech.eu/index.php/jtse/article/view/321 <p style="font-weight: 400;">Nowadays smart cities have become a necessity for rapidly changing and transforming urban environments and the core technologies enabling this development are Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs), 5G networks, and Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies alone offer an important contribution, but when integrated effectively, they offer the opportunity of uninterrupted connectivity, real-time data sharing and management of urban resources. This paper conducts a comprehensive literature review to study existing techniques/approaches and challenges for integrating VANET, VDTN, 5G, and IoT within smart cities based on three research questions. Recent articles from databases such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate and MDPI, were reviewed to examine this integration, to identify recent advancements in this topic with focus on innovative methodologies proposed in an international context and to highlight the research gaps, challenges and solutions. The VOSviewer software was used to build the keyword co-occurrence network and to cluster the relevant literature. Our findings reveal that although promising solutions exist, issues such as high mobility, heterogeneous network architecture, and resource constraints remain critical barriers to large-scale deployment of smart city applications. Furthermore, this review proposes a conceptual framework for intelligent and adaptive network integration of VANET, VDTN, IoT, and 5G for future smart city applications.</p> Orjola Jaupi Evjola Spaho Copyright (c) 2025 Journal of Transactions in Systems Engineering https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2025-10-02 2025-10-02 3 3 420 448 10.15157/JTSE.2025.3.3.420-448