Abstract The current telecommunication infrastructure is reaching its limits, no longer able to cope with the ever-growing number of connected devices and data traffic summed to the future QoS demand of 5G. To overcome such limitations, the Heterogeneous Cloud Radio Access Network (H-CRAN) has been considered as a promising architecture that includes very dense Radio Access Networks (RAN) and the centralization of signal processing at baseband pools. In scenarios with severe constraints and very dynamic network conditions, mobile users may face poor handover (HO) performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel combination between Software-Defined Wireless Networking (SDWN) and Software-Defined Handover Decision Engine (SDHDE) to approach optimal HO performance in H-CRAN. In particular, in the baseband pool, a wireless controller is used to receive HO information from the Southbound API communicating with the end-users at the RAN. The controllers publish this information to the SDHDE through the Northbound API, and SDHDE processes the HO decision for each user in an optimal manner. The reported simulation results demonstrate the improvements that our approach can achieve, mainly regarding smaller HO percentage failure and increased throughput.