Due to the special control system and structure of the VSC-HVDC system, as there is a line fault, the fault current rises quickly and the converter device can be damaged easily. In this paper, the influence of sampling rate on the sensitivity of protection is studied based on the basic principle of traveling wave protection. Simulation analysis shows that the appropriate high sampling rate can improve the sensitivity of traveling wave protection significantly. It presents an improved wave protection which uses pole-wave variance-ratio as the start criterion, adopts the pole-wave slope as a criterion to distinguish lighting interferences and short circuit faults, and employs the pole wave difference value to detect the fault pole. The simulation analysis of a two-terminal VSC-HVDC on PSCAD/EMTDC platform validates that the new wave protection has good sensitivity and strong anti-interference ability. This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51507064).