The utilization of wireless sensor networks to gather, process, and act upon data may be a powerful tool in the development of a city-wide communication network that can accommodate many applications, ultimately leading to smart city solutions. Several challenges might be encountered by a smart city network. These include the need to adapt the network's coverage area to suit various applications, uneven distribution of nodes, a rise in message volume, the use of several communication technologies, and heterogeneity in both nodes and messages. There are many different facets of smart cities that are being studied, and certain applications are being created in each of them. Several options for smart city sensor networks are outlined in this article, which uses a survey format. Applications like ridesharing, emergency medical services, and others that depend on real-time traffic data supplied by the smart traffic domain are used to examine message transmission problems in this study. The versatility and speed with which Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) may set up networks have led to their widespread use. Because mobile nodes function best in tandem and have faith in one another, we take a look at MANET routing algorithms and how they handle message transmission for this service.