In this paper, we investigate the performance of Mobile IP regional registration and compare it with that of Mobile IP. The performance measures used are registration delay and the CPU processing overheads loaded on the agents to handle mobility of mobile nodes. Through the investigation, the effectiveness of adopting Mobile IP regional registration in the wide-area wireless network in terms of reducing the CPU processing overheads on the home agent and lowering the signaling delay is observed. We also compare the scalability of Mobile IP regional registration schemes when two and three levels of foreign agent hierarchy are considered. Based on the comparison, we propose a network design strategy for achieving optimized performance and cost.