The network performance is an imperative factor for the customers to select a mobile network operator (MNO). The customers demand seamless mobility and services with minimal packet loss and ultra-low latency from the subscribed MNO. Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is one of the key enabling solutions of fifth generation (5G), which has the potential to enhance throughput, latency, packet loss rate (PLR) performances of the network. 5G is expected to support high mobility and smaller range heterogeneous cells. This leads to frequent handovers. The unessential handovers may cause wastage of network resources. The improper network selection may prompt extreme quality degradation. In this work, a three-stage fuzzy-logic-based handover necessity estimation and target selection scheme is proposed for general heterogeneous networks. The simulation results prove that PLR, number of handovers executed and throughput performances of the proposed scheme are superior than the conventional and fuzzy-based multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) schemes. Even though this scheme is demonstrated for D2D application, it can be extended for any heterogeneous network scenarios. © 2020 World Scientific Publishing Company.