In accordance with an example embodiment, there is disclosed a method comprising: receiving, by a user equipment in a wireless network, beam information from a serving cell and each neighboring cell; assessing a beam quality of the serving cell and each neighboring cell from the information; determining a subset of the serving cell and neighboring cells comprising the serving cell and each neighboring cell with a beam quality within a first offset of the serving cell and each neighboring cell with a highest quality beam; ranking each cell of the subset in descending order from highest to lowest quality.