Heterogeneous Vehicular Networking: A Survey on Architecture, Challenges, and Solutions

TLDR

Intelligent Transportation Systems have spurred extensive study of vehicular communication, yet while DSRC enables efficient real‑time exchange without roadside infrastructure, cellular networks alone cannot always meet stringent safety requirements, and joint research of DSRC and cellular remains nascent. This work surveys HetVNETs, which combine cellular and DSRC to satisfy ITS communication needs, and emphasizes the necessity of understanding heterogeneity and its challenges. The survey reviews recent wireless techniques for HetVNETs, outlines safety and non‑safety service requirements, proposes a framework that integrates multiple networking methods, details application scenarios, and discusses MAC‑ and network‑layer challenges and solutions. Finally, the authors identify open issues that guide future research directions in HetVNETs.

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), vehicular communication networks have been widely studied in recent years. Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) can provide efficient real-time information exchange among vehicles without the need of pervasive roadside communication infrastructure. Although mobile cellular networks are capable of providing wide coverage for vehicular users, the requirements of services that require stringent real-time safety cannot always be guaranteed by cellular networks. Therefore, the Heterogeneous Vehicular NETwork (HetVNET), which integrates cellular networks with DSRC, is a potential solution for meeting the communication requirements of the ITS. Although there are a plethora of reported studies on either DSRC or cellular networks, joint research of these two areas is still at its infancy. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on recent wireless networks techniques applied to HetVNETs. Firstly, the requirements and use cases of safety and non-safety services are summarized and compared. Consequently, a HetVNET framework that utilizes a variety of wireless networking techniques is presented, followed by the descriptions of various applications for some typical scenarios. Building such HetVNETs requires a deep understanding of heterogeneity and its associated challenges. Thus, major challenges and solutions that are related to both the Medium Access Control (MAC) and network layers in HetVNETs are studied and discussed in detail. Finally, we outline open issues that help to identify new research directions in HetVNETs.