Abstract--A minimum connected dominating set (MCDS) is used as virtual backbone for efficient routing and broadcasting in ad hoc sensor networks. The minimum CDS problem is NP-complete even in unit disk graphs. Many heuristics based distributed approximation algorithm for MCDS problems are reported and the best known performance ratio has (4.8 + ln 5). We propose a new heuristics called collaborative cover using two principles: i) domatic number of a connected graph is at least two and ii) optimal substructure defined as subset of independent dominator preferably with a common connector. We obtain a partial Steiner tree during the construction of the independent set (dominators). A final post processing step identifies the Steiner nodes in the formation of Steiner tree for the independent set of G. We show that our collaborative cover heuristics is better than degree based heuristics in identifying independent set and Steiner tree. While our distributed approximation CDS algorithm achieves the performance ratio of (4.8+ln 5)opt+1.2, where opt is the size of any optimal CDS, we also show that the collaborative cover heuristics is able to give a marginally better bound when the distribution of sensor nodes is uniform permitting identification of the optimal sub-structures. We show that the message complexity of our algorithm is O(n2 ), being the maximum degree of a node in graph and the time complexity is O(n).