Hierarchical mobility management is sensitive to the failure of gateway mobility agents and prone to degrade performance on heavy loads. This paper proposes a distributed and adaptive location management scheme based on Hierarchical Mobile IPv6. This scheme can balance the loads of mobility anchor points and increase the robustness of the hierarchical structure to certain extents. In this scheme, the optimized IP paging scheme is adopted to reduce the paging signaling cost and improve the scalability of the hierarchical mobility management. We implement the distributed and adaptive location management scheme in a simulation platform and compare its performance with that of two other location management schemes. Our simulation results show that our scheme is capable of balancing the signaling and traffic loads of mobility ancher points, decreasing the average handover latency, and increasing the throughout of the visited networks. Hierarchical mobility management is sensitive to the failure of gateway mobility agents and prone to degrade performance on heavy loads. This paper proposes a distributed and adaptive location management scheme based on Hierarchical Mobile IPv6. This scheme can balance the loads of mobility anchor points and increase the robustness of the hierarchical structure to certain extents. In this scheme, the optimized IP paging scheme is adopted to reduce the paging signaling cost and improve the scalability of the hierarchical mobility management. We implement the distributed and adaptive location management scheme in a simulation platform and compare its performance with that of two other location management schemes. Our simulation results show that our scheme is capable of balancing the signaling and traffic loads of mobility ancher points, decreasing the average handover latency, and increasing the throughout of the visited networks.