Minimising cost of lawful interception in mobile IP

Communications interception is an essential part of law enforcement used by authorized government agencies to investigate criminal activities. With the growth of IP based applications and new IP technologies such as mobile IP, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will find themselves increasingly obliged to provide interception capabilities. IP interception is usually done with expensive hardware based systems the cost of which ISPs would like to minimize. In this paper we propose the use of optimisation techniques to find the optimal location(s) of systems in the network needed to be installed while minimising the cost and ensuring complete coverage of the network.