Predictive Lawful Interception in Mobile IPv6 Networks

The lawful interception (LI) of communications is necessary in modern telecommunications networks in order to help law enforcement agencies with the investigation and prosecution of criminal activities. The challenging aspect of LI in mobile IPv6 networks lies in the variety of ways that the network can be operated and translates into LI solutions which range in complexity from trivial to complex. In turn, the complexity of an LI solution manifests in LI signalling volume and effects the ability to fulfill critical LI requirements such as capturing 100% of target traffic. We propose a generic LI architecture that supports user mobility prediction schemes to fulfill LI requirements. We then propose two simple user mobility prediction schemes before analysing their prediction performance and effect on LI metrics. Our results show that the simple prediction scheme proposed in this paper can accurately predict the future position of a mobile user and can lead to the fulfillment of LI requirements, such as capturing 100% of target traffic, while at the same time being sensitive to security issues by restricting interception activation only to parts of the network that are visited by the mobile target.