In nested mobile networks, the undesirable effects due to nonoptimal routing tends to get aggravated, leading to excessively long packet sizes and transfer delays. In this paper, in order to resolve the non-optimal routing problem, also known as ‘pinball routing problem’ in the literature, we propose a new route optimization scheme where the care-of address (CoA) in each binding update (BU) message is recursively substituted by the intermediate mobile routers in the mobile network. Through qualitative and numerical analyses, we show that the proposed scheme indeed demonstrates a greatly reduced signaling overhead in terms of packet sizes and number of BU messages required, thereby reducing the RO setup time and end-to-end transfer delay. We also show that the proposed scheme can be a good solution for the so-called intra-MoNET routing problem.