Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is continuously evolving alongside communication technologies and autonomous driving, giving way to new applications and services. Considering the significant rise in traffic casualties, protecting vulnerable road users (VRU), such as pedestrians, cyclists, motorcycles, animals, etc., has become ever more critical. That said, technological advances alone can not meet the requirements of such crucial applications. Therefore, combining them with architectural revolutions, particularly cloud, fog, and edge computing, is essential. In this review, we scrutinize the VRU safety application with regard to technological evolution. This review establishes the foundations for designing resilient, more reliable, end-to-end VRU protection services. It illustrates the possibility of combining the performance of different technologies through exploiting 5G architectural advantages (function placement, direct/indirect communication, etc.) for the intended application. In the context of 5G architecture, collision avoidance systems consider network and application-related challenges and solutions. This survey provides standardization, studies, and project efforts related to the use case and considers the different types of messages in the V2VRU communication-based safety application. We investigate how adapting the application parameters to the network state and devices' available resources can use network resources efficiently and provide reliable services.