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Babu Ram Dawadi, 1Surendra Shrestha
1
Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Pulchowk Campus, Tribhuvan University
Abstract
For the advancement on traffic monitoring and control over the possible fraud due to the misuse of
telecommunication/internet service and with the requirement on empowering regulator towards efficient
regulation, revenue evaluation and cross-verify quality of telecom services, we proposed a framework of
Telecommunications Traffic Monitoring and Fraud Control System (TERAMOCS) for the regulators of
developing countries like Nepal. TERAMOCS is a complete system conceptualized for the lawful interception,
ILD and domestic voice/data traffic monitoring with fraud detection and control over the network of telecom
service operators of Nepal who are providing telecom and internet services to the public.
Keywords: Telecommunications, Policy, Regulator, Traffic Monitoring, Quality of Service, Fraud Control
1. Introduction
In the recent years, controlling of illegal call bypass like VoIP call and other mobile/internet related threats
become the major issues for the telecom/internet service providers and the regulator of Nepal. Incoming VoIP
call termination, Skype/Viber like call termination business to Nepal is not opened to all telecom/internet
service providers leading to challenges of controlling those illegal activities. There are six major telecom
operators and more than sixty internet service providers at Nepal [1] providing voice and data communication
services. Millions of international call traffic have been exchanged via the network of those operators having
international gateway license.
With the liberalization of the telecom sector, different telecom service licensees were awarded to provide
telecom service across the country. At present, there are six major telecom licensees who are allowed to provide
voice telephony services. There are collective subscriber base of 36.21 million subscribers [2] as of July, 2017.
All licensed operators have international gateways and are interconnected with each other. The major telecom
service providers of Nepal are 1) NDCL – Nepal Doorsanchar Company Limited 2) NCell – NcellPvt Limited
3) UTL – United Telecom Limited, 4) STPL – Smart Telecom Pvt. Ltd, 5) CGC – C.G. Telecom Pvt. Ltd, 6)
NSTPL – Nepal Satellite Telecom Pvt. Ltd.
Various technologies are used by the licensed operators to connect the users through VSAT, GSM, CDMA
& PSTN. Operators have to provide regular information to the Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA)
such as volumes of International/National (Offnet/Onnet) calls, number of subscribers, complaints reported
and handled by the licensed operators along with other information that the authority needs from time to time
for effectively delivering its function and collecting relevant fees. To ensure this, consumers are provided with
best services by the licensed operators in Nepal, NTA established Quality of Service parameters for Basic,
Cellular and Internet Services [3]. Some key QoS parameters were benchmarked and Key Performance
Indicators (KPI) were defined by sub-dividing the parameters to Network Performance, Billing Complaints &
Readdresal and Customer Perception regarding the Services. Network performance is measured through
Service Access Delay, Call Set-up Success Rate, Call Drop Ratio & Point of Interconnection (PoI) congestion.
Similarly there are KPIs for billing complaints and customer perception. NTA through its interim directive
NEIR 2072 (National Equipment Identity Register-2072) has taken a step further to incorporate a NEIR to
2 5th International Symposium on Advanced and Applied Convergence (Nov. 9-12, 2017)
detect and block illegal usage of handsets in the country and also establish a detail process for registration of
Handsets though its type approval process, the responsibility of which has been placed with the operators to
establish, install, operate and maintain the NEIR.
As being a regulator, it is required to monitor the real traffic flowing in the operator's network to investigate
over the fraud activities and revenue generation. Currently Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) lacks
the real time monitoring system to effectively monitor the ILD as well as domestic interconnect traffic of the
operators.
The authority shall also find a mechanism to interlink all the technical systems to interoperate by
exchanging key information between them that will provide a wider range of input data to the regulator
to look at a situation and possible solutions and causes, sources. For example the NEIR and fraud
control solutions shall be interconnected and interlinked to provide IMEI’s identified to fraud control
solution and consolidate the detection base by comparing the two. Another example would be for the
anti-fraud solution to be interlinked with the traffic measurement solution to detect illegal gateways.
With the advent of technologies, there have been a shift on how citizens communicate. There is an
increase in VoIP technologies like WhatsApp, Viber, Skype and other services that are used for calls.
This also leaves a gray area for fraudsters to operate gateways on VoIP technologies and other means
to bypass the local networks. Hence the authority shall additionally consider the possibility of
technologies to inspect IPv4/v6 traffic within the country together with the implementation of Telecom
traffic measurement, fraud control & QoS Solution.
Interception Modernization Program [10] is an initiative taken by UK government to lawfully intercept and
store communication data in the central database. Similarly Mastering the Internet (MTI) is a mass surveillance
system operated by British Intelligence Agency to perform monitoring of social contents and email messages.
DCSNet [11] is the real time point-and-click surveillance system owned by US Federal Bureau of
Investigation. This system performs instant wiretaps on any telecommunication device located in the United
States. Similarly Financial Crimes Enforcement Network [12] is a network system operated by department of
Treasury that collects and analyzes financial transactions in order to avoid financial crimes.
Looking into the foreign countries scenarios, almost every country has implemented its own proprietary
monitoring system for the lawful interception of international and national traffic to identify different criminal
activities in their country network.
Table 1. Best practices by foreign regulatory agencies
Regulator’s Name Implemented Solution Focusing Features
A traffic control system
Regulatory Authority
(TCRA), Tanzania
supervision center
Communications
management and
Supervision
Regulatory
RURA
Center
management and
Interconnection
Ghana
Authority, Central
African Republic
ns Regulatory
Interconnecti
National des
Monitoring
Le Conseil
System
on
An independent transmission system should be established with connectivity from the operator locations to
the CMS & DR sites like shown in Fig. 3. It shall have redundancy to maintain business continuity like primary
connectivity through wired and backup through microwave/wired link. The failover should be automatic
should an issue occur with the primary connectivity link, a real time link monitoring system should be available
that would show the utilization and other key information of the specific link for troubleshooting and reporting
the issue to the operators for follow-up and closure. A real time monitoring tool should be available to monitor
the status of the equipment installed at the operator sites and the links tapped to see if there are any issues with
individual links, servers or network components like switches and routers used and provide out of box SLA’s
for all components of the TMS. Equipment at operator’s site shall have its own backup to maintain adequate
power until the operator generators start to provide power. The system shall also be equipped with required
tools to generate invoices in the frequency required by the regulator to invoice the operators their due of fees.
This system should also be equipped to compare the CDRs submitted to the authority by the operators on a
periodic basis and compare them with the CDRs generated by the system to verify and identify any deviations
in the operator’s network or undeclared, missing links by the operators. A trouble ticketing system should exist
to log all incidents such as outages, issues with the system and operator links. The NOC should be manned
with staff 24x7 to monitor the network and act as interface with the operators for technical issues and follow
up. Change management should be incorporated and all changes should go through a change management
system. Both incident and change management should follow Information Technology Infrastructure Library
(ITIL-V3) standard specifications. The system should be able to process and visualize ILD traffic exported in
different standards (vendor neutral) format by the operators itself.
MIS reports should be made available through the system exportable in both Excel & PDF formats where
volume, link utilization kind of data can be generated. The option to derive custom/on demand reports should
also exist. Similarly an overview of the traffic and summary should also be made available by the system.
These summaries should be able to identify the traffic by its source country, destination network. All the
equipment involved in the monitoring environment should be dual stack capable for both IPv4 and IPv6 packet
processing.
Telecommunications Traffic Monitoring and Fraud Control System 7
Fig. 2. Framework for signal probing and communication with central monitoring system
integration of the two solutions and provide details of the calls which are missing from TMS. This will
additionally provide the regulator with a second level check to see if there are any undeclared or missing links
not reported by the operators or are they any additional gateways operational in Nepal not recorded
independently by the fraud control system. To deal with the special cases of changed CLI and no CLI and
eliminate the possibility of fraud this information should be sent to the operators for investigation on their
network and provide feedback. Secondly the efforts need to be made by the operators to comply with regulatory
guidelines for presenting CLI for all calls in the country and not to change the CLI in some specific cases if
exists. Once the system is operational or soon after regulator is able to provide specific originating countries
where it would like to include as origin countries for the calling campaign. The solution shall be able to
incorporate the same and make changes to adhere to the requirements of regulator, furthermore the calling
campaign should be flexible to target calls based on different routes namely low, mid and high priced doing
this will cover all possible options of fraud detection using the antifraud solution.
Acknowledgement
This research study was carried out on 2016 under the partial support from Nepal Telecommunications
Authority.
References
[1] Nepal Telecommunications Authority (2017), Licensee Lists. http://nta.gov.np
[2] Nepal Telecommunications Authority (2017), MIS Report, Issue 105, Vol 153. Nepal
[3] Nepal Telecommunications Authority (2016), QoS Bylaw. http://nta.gov.np
[4] M.A. Bihina Bella, J.H.P. Eloff, M.S. Olivier, “A fraud management system architecture for next-generation
networks”, Forensic Science International 185 (2009) 51–58, Elsevier
[5] C. Pollard, “Telecom Fraud: The cost of doing nothing just went up”, Computers & Security (2005) 24, 437 – 439,
Elsevier
[6] Addison Litton, “The State of Surveillance in India: The Central Monitoring System’s Chilling Effect on Self-
Expression”, 14 Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev. 799 (2015),
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_globalstudies/vol14/iss4/17
[7] The Great Firewall of China, https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-
11/FreedomOfInformationChina/the-great-firewall-of-china-background/index.html
[8] Privacy and SORM, http://www.tele2.com/our-responsibility/esg/topics-relevant-matters/social/user-safety/privacy-
and-sorm/
[9] C. Akrivopoulou, N. Garipidis. Digital Democracy and the Impact of Technology on Governance and Poli
tics: New Globalized Practices, IGI Global (2013) USA, ISBN: 978-1-46666-3637-8 (eBook)
[10] Musa Khan Jalalzai, The Crisis of Britain's Surveillance State: Security, Law Enforcement and the Intellig
ence War in Cyberspace, Algora Publishing New York (2014). ISBN: 978-1-62894-078-7 (eBook).
[11] RYAN SINGEL, How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates. Wired Magazine (2007-8-29), Online:
https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiretap/
[12] FinCEN. https://www.fincen.gov/what-we-do