With the great increase of connected devices and new types of applications, mobile networks are witnessing exponential growth of traffic volume. To meet emerging requirements, it is widely agreed that the fifth-generation mobile network will be ultradense and heterogeneous. However, the deployment of a high number of small cells in such networks poses challenges for the mobility management, including frequent, undesired, and ping-pong handovers, not to mention issues related to increased delay and failure of the handover process.The adoption of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies into 5G networks offers a new way to address the above-mentioned challenges. These technologies offer tools and mechanisms to make networks flexible, programmable, and more manageable. The SDN has global network control ability so that various functions such as the handover control can be implemented in the SDN architecture to manage the handover efficiently. In this article, we propose a Software-Defined Handover (SDHO) solution to optimize the handover in future 5G networks. In particular, we design a Software-Defined Handover Management Engine (SDHME) to handle the handover control mechanism in 5G ultradense networks. The SDHME is defined in the application plane of the SDN architecture, executed by the control plane to orchestrate the data plane. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the conventional LTE handover strategy, the proposed approach significantly reduces the handover failure ratio and handover delay. KEYWORDS 5G ultradense networks, fast handover, network function virtualization, software-defined networking, virtual cell Int J Commun Syst. 2019;32:e3831. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac FIGURE 1 Topology of ultradense network (UDN) toward 5G. SDN, software-defined networkingexperience. The topology of UDN toward 5G is illustrated in Figure 1. In UDN, a high number of point of attachment (PoA) are distributed randomly without network planning. 3 The next-generation network is characterized by heterogeneous networks having different coverage ranges such as picocell, femtocell, attocell, and multiple radio access technologies (RATs) such as 4G, 5G, and WLAN. In this way, a greater number of simultaneous device connections are enabled by the ultradense heterogeneous small cells.Although UDN helps to solve coverage, capacity, spectrum efficiency, and data rates problems on the access side, it issues many challenges to the mobility management such as handover problems faced by mobile users and poor performance like long handover delay, failures, and increased signaling overhead. This causes disconnection and quality of service (QoS) degradation. Accordingly, ultradense 5G mobile networks require innovations in the management of the network and necessitate a novel and accurate handover management mechanism to deal with these challenges. Recently, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) organization has focused on software-defined networking (SDN) and netwo...