Seamless Lawful Interception Handover for 3G IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)

After the 9.11 terror attack, lawful Interception (LI) has emerged as an important tool for anti-terrorist activity. Law enforcement agents and administrative government bodies effectively monitor suspicious target users of permanent IP-based network devices by LI in Packet Data Networks (PDNs). However, it is difficult to perform LI in monitoring migrating users from a location to another, who change their IPs due to the proliferation of portable Internet devices enabling 3G IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). The existing, manual handover technique in 3G IMS makes it even more difficult to continue the LI activities due to time-lag reissuance of LI authority warrants when the target users move to a new LI jurisdiction via a roaming service. Our proposed model is a seamless LI handover mechanism in 3G IMS to support mobility detection of the target users. The LI warrants are transferred to the new LI agent automatically with the target users when they move to a new LI jurisdiction. Thus, time-lag human intervention of reissuance of the LI warrants is removed and enables the LI authorities to continue monitoring. In the simulation of our proposed mechanism, the quality of lawful interception achieves a mean score of over 97.5% out of the possible 100% maximum score, whereas the quality of the existing mechanism has a mean score of 22.725%. Keywords: lawful interception, seamless handover, IP multimedia subsystem, 3G networks, dynamic triggering