Law Enforcement and Traceback of VoIP Services in Heterogeneous Networks

Recently, an increasing number of incidents by crime and terrorist organizations have used VoIP technology as an alternative communication tool to evade lawful communication interception. The capability of tracking VoIP calls has become imperative and critical to national security and law enforcement. Hence, it is mandatory that the law enforcement of traditional phone services be expanded to cover VoIP services. VoIP services have been provisioned in a variety of forms and across IP (wired and wireless) and telecommunication networks. It has made the law enforcement of VoIP services complex and challenging. In this paper, we investigate the problem of tracing the true identities and geo-locations of the caller/callee of a “managed” VoIP call, by the provision of traceback related information (TRI). We propose a traceback architecture, the functionalities of its components, the TRI information and the data bases crucial for leg-by-leg VoIP origin traceback in VoIP lawful enforcement and traceback. An IP-to-3G and IP-to-IP with NAT VoIP call traceback is presented to illustrate the concepts and designs of the proposed work. Furthermore, we also extend our work to IMS-based Next Generation Networks (NGN) VoIP call traceback.