Urban vehicular ad hoc network (UVANET) is a modality of high-topology variation MANET where vehicles travel across constrained layout of the roads and tall buildings, which eventually results in shadowing effects. One of the critical challenges in UVANET is the handover process that happens when a vehicle changes its association with the roadside unit. Urban area suffers from high vehicular density at traffic signals, and vehicle slowdowns caused by speed limits, frequent link disconnection caused by signal attenuation due to obstacles.Thus, it is difficult for UVANET to disseminate the packets to their destinations located in a specified area. This paper presents an effective handover management that calculates the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) to ultimately determine the optimal cluster head for seamless handover in UVANET. It also utilizes the software-defined network to resolve the problem of handover failure in UVANET. The finding in the experimental results shows that the developed association clustering mechanism based on SINR significantly outperforms the baseline association mechanism. More importantly, it can resolve different types of handover problems that improved the quality of service in terms of throughput, handover latency, packet loss ratio, and handover failure ratio, when compared to the baseline handover mechanisms. Trans Emerging Tel Tech. 2019;30:e3787. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ett FIGURE 1 SDN-based VANET handover management architecture. LOS, line-of-sight; SDN, software-defined network; VANET, vehicular ad hoc network; V2R, vehicle-to-roadside unit; V2V, vehicle-to-vehicle the efficiency of communication between vehicles in UVANET. Essentially, the communication in UVANET based on software-defined network (SDN) can be classified into two main types: vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-roadside unit (V2R). 4,5The controller base station has the role of SDN controller, which can guide the vehicles to make handover decisions based on several metrics such as vehicles speed and direction, location of vehicles, received signal strength indication (RSSI), and roadside unit (RSU) congestion. Handover in UVANET is a method to change the management of operative communication from one RSU to another. In seamless handover, the operative communication between vehicles should be continued while they are mobile from one RSU to another without perceptible latency. Many literature research studies proposed various solutions for handover in UVANET; however, they did not revoke the crucial difficulties of handover including quality of connection reduction and degradation of the QoS performance of the UVANET. Moreover, the characteristic of UVANET can cause enormous types of unnecessary handovers, which consumes more energy in order to control traffic congestion and this eventually leads to handover failure. The most crucial problems that cause handover failure in UVANET primarily includes mobility, communications jamming and interference, coverage hole, and data traffic congesti...