Vehicular area network (VAN) as a part of vehicular network is developed rapidly by integrating different techniques, e.g., sensing, wireless communications, GIS and satellite navigation techniques. The integration of these techniques forms a heterogeneous network and intimates strong requirements for the VAN gateway design. In this paper, a cognitive VAN gateway is designed to meet requirements of the heterogeneous network. The multichannel joint rate and admission control (MJRAC) with better quality of services (QoS) is proposed in multi-channel VAN scenarios based on the joint rate and admission control (JRAC) method. The simulation results show that MJRAC can increase the overall QoS greatly, especially for low-data-rate services.