An intelligent determination of a set of candidate handover-beams for a radio access network (RAN) can be facilitated by a RAN intelligent controller (RIC). The RIC can obtain data associated with user equipment devices and their current state, historical patterns, and a current state of serving network node devices and neighboring network node devices. Based on the obtained data, a handover procedure can be optimized by the user equipment by estimating the signal quality from a source cell and neighboring cells. Additionally, the user equipment can send measurement reports to the network to identify and quantify the quality of reference signals transmitted by the network node devices.