Introduction

Lawful Interception (LI) is a legal requirement in most of the countries. It enables the legal authorities to obtain communications network data for analysis or evidence. It is a method of intercepting certain data-streams of end-users in both directions, and tunnel the intercepted traffic to a Mediation Device (MD) with information about direction of capture and reference to the intercepted connection.

Leaf node is the Point of Interception (POI) and MD is the final Point of Collection (POC).

Supported Platforms

Not all features are necessarily supported on each hardware platform. Refer to the Platform Guide for the features and the sub-features that are or are not supported by each platform.

Components of Lawful Interception

The figure below shows the different components of the LI solution.

li network diagram

Definitions

L(QMX)

Leaf node in the POD which is connected to subscribers.

S/BL

Spine and Border Leaf in the POD, which can be replaced with just one node.

LI Box

Lawful Intercept Box, which communicates to Law Enforcement Agency (LEMF) and relays mirrored traffic. Two LI boxes per POD are connected for redundancy.

PAO

POD Access Orchestrator, which configures the LI Box and network nodes with LI configurations.

DST

Destination node for traffic from subscribers.

Abbreviations

Abbreviation Definition

LI

Lawful Interception

POI

Point of Interception

POC

Point of Collection

PAO

Pod Access Orchestrator

LIMS

Lawful Interception Management System

VRF

Virtual Routing Instance

LEMF

Lawful Enforcement Monitoring Facility

Leaf

Access node

PPPoE

Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet

L2TP

Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol

MPLS

Multi Protocol Label Switching