SUMMARYWith the spread of multimedia group applications, the construction of multicast trees satisfying the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements becomes a problem of prime importance. A principal factor of these real-time applications is to optimize the delay-and delay variation-bounded multicast tree (DVBMT) problem. This problem is to satisfy the minimum delay variation and the end-to-end delay within an upper bound. The DVBMT problem is known as an NP-complete problem. The representative algorithms are the DVMA, the DDVCA, and the ECS algorithm. In this paper, we show that the proposed ESC algorithm outperforms the DDVCA and the ECS algorithm. The efficiency of our algorithm is verified through performance evaluation and the enhancement is up to about 19.6% in terms of normalized surcharge for multicast delay variation. The time complexity of our algorithm is O(mn 2 ), which is comparable to the well-known DDVCA.