SUMMARYThe Digital Audio-Visual Council has adopted the Request/Reply (RQRP) protocol, proposed by one of the authors, for the delivery mechanism of MPEG video streams. In this paper, we investigate the network characteristics of the RQRP protocol and analyse the protocol's performance via both simulation as well as actual experimental results. In this simulation, the RQRP protocol was mathematically an ideal model "rst and later, a feedback control system. Simulation results showed that, for both models, the network tra$c is able to follow the playout rate at the receiver. In the case of the latter, which involves a simpler implementation, oscillation in network tra$c is observed. A video-on-demand (VoD) system using the RQRP protocol was developed and experiments were performed. The results obtained are consistent with the simulation results.