The invention belongs to the network technical field, in particular to an online traffic identification method based on an incremental clustering algorithm. The method includes: an offline recognitionstage and an online recognition stage, wherein in the offline recognition stage,a semi-supervised learning flow algorithm based on an improved K-means algorithm is used to perform preliminary clustering and mapping work on the prepared training data sets, and the data sets which are preliminarily classifiedare obtained; in the online recognition stage,based on the completed clustering and mappingdata sets formed in the offline identification phase, incremental clustering is used to determine the network application type of the newly added data streams online, so as to achieve the purpose oftraffic identification. According to the method,based on machine learning technology, by constructing a suitable recognition model to learn the prepared data, the online traffic can be incrementally clustered in real time, and the preliminary semi-supervised classification can be carried out by combining the prepared training set, which can realize the online recognition of network traffic, and has good real-time performance and high recognition rate.