SUMMARY
We consider on‐line detection of persistently high packet‐rate flows. We assume that flow information is collected via a time‐based sliding window scheme with random packet sampling. In this framework, we propose a method of determining the threshold of the number of sampled packets, which guarantees the false negative ratio. We also formulate and solve the design problem of our scheme, where we aim to minimize the false positive ratio. We then conduct sampling experiments with public trace data and confirm that our method works well as designed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.