Handoff latency affects the service quality of real-time applications. Mobile IP presents the standard mobility management protocol to support the mobility in IP-based systems. However, mobile IP is not adequate for delay sensitive applications. The mobile IP fast authentication protocol (MIFA) is proposed to avoid the problems of mobile IP and to match the requirements of real-time applications. MIFA processes the handoff procedure locally, as is the case with micro mobility management protocols. However, MIFA does not rely on intermediate nodes between the home agent and the foreign agent. Thus, MIFA does not require a hierarchical network architecture as is the case with most micro mobility management protocols, e.g. hierarchical mobile IP (HMIP). A performance analysis shows that MIFA performs similar to HMIP when the mobile node (MN) moves within a domain consisting of two hierarchy levels only and outperforms HMIP otherwise. In this paper we develop an analytical model to analyze MIFA and compare it to HMIP. Our study focuses a comparison of the signaling cost of the two protocols. Our analysis shows that MIFA clearly outperforms HMIP with respect to the packet delivery cost. This is because MIFA eliminates the extra packet delivery cost resulting from the triangular routing that packets experience with HMIP. Additionally, the location update cost when deploying MIFA is comparable to the location update cost using HMIP. Thus MIFA is more effective than HMIP with respect to the total signaling cost.