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 model the different types of mobility management algorithms. To obtain a good description of the network we calculate parameters from given topologies that we think are the most important ones. Mobility approaches derived from existing protocols and other, possible mobility scenarios are analyzed and their performance is numerically compared in various network and mobility scenarios. The aim is to give general designing guidelines for the next generation mobility managements on given network and mobility properties.