Unlike traditional cellular networks, which provide mainly voice services, there is, at present, no method that enables the effective management of terminal mobility for both active and idle mobile terminals in data networks. Although IP paging has been introduced to reduce power consumption of dormant mobile terminals, there is no concern to design an effective IP paging method for real wireless environments. Therefore, we propose a new dormant registration based IP paging method and analyze the effect of the dormant registration threshold used in IP paging on the performance of mobility management. Moreover, we demonstrate the importance of selecting an appropriate value for the dormant registration threshold. (C) 2004 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.