Internet traffic has increased steeply in recent years, mainly due to the fruition of video and other streaming contents, social platforms and peer-to-peer networks. In addition, the quick penetration of hand-held devices equipped with multiple radios (e.g., 3G and WiFi), sees to it that wireless access represents an ever-growing portion of current and future demand, thus encouraging operators to investigate and deploy different combinations of wireless access technologies with the purpose of educing their operational costs (the so-called “4G” architecture).It is hence necessary to adopt an efficient mobility management technique to meet users’ expectation of an “anywhere, anytime” connectivity. Nevertheless, the use of centralized mobility management approaches – such as Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6 – is foreseen to bring some difficulties to operators, due to the expected large number of mobile users and their exigent demands. All this has triggered the need for Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) alternatives, focused on moving the mobility anchors from the core network to the edge, pushing them closer to the users. The purpose of such new research direction is to overcome the limitations imposed by a centralized approach, alleviating operators’ costs by deploying a more efficient network, envisioning also the heterogeneity of the underlying technology. This work first explores two protocols for mobility support, Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6, taken as main referents for, respectively, the host-based mobility approach and the network based one. We next elaborate the extensions and the changes to transform them according to the distributed mobility management paradigm, proposing several complete solutions. Finally, we analytically compare the distributed solutions to their centralized counterparts, in order to derive which are the most suitable scenarios for their applicability.