  This paper investigates mobility management strategies from the point of view
of their need of signalling and processing resources on the backbone network
and load on the air interface. A method is proposed to model the serving
network and mobile node mobility in order to be able to compare the different
types of mobility management algorithms. To obtain a good description of the
network we calculate descriptive parameters from given topologies. Most
mobility approaches derived from existing protocols are analyzed and their
performances are numerically compared in various network and mobility
scenarios. We developed a mobility management framework that is able to give
general designing guidelines for the next generation mobility managements on
given network, technology and mobility properties. With our model an operator
can design the network and tune the parameters to obtain the optimal
implementation of course revising existing systems is also possible. We present
a vertical handover decision method as a special application of our model
framework.
