This brief examines recent developments in the Heterogeneous Vehicular NETworks (HETVNETs), integrating cellular networks with Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) for meeting the communications requirements of the Intelligent Transport System (ITS)services. Along with a review of recent literature, a unified framework of the HetVNET is presented. The brief focuses on introducing efficient MAC mechanisms for vehicular communications, including channel access protocols, broadcast/multicast protocols, the location-based channel congestion control scheme and the content-based resource allocation scheme. The cooperative communication between vehicles is discussed. This brief concludes with a discussion on future research directions, and provides the readers with useful insights into the future designs in the HetVNETs, to motivate new ideas for performance improvements in vehicular networks.
