Wireless ad hoc and sensor networks play an important role in providing flexible deployment and mobile connectivity for next generation network. Since there is no fixed physical backbone infrastructure, some of the nodes are selected to form a virtual backbone. Efficient algorithms for identifying the Minimum Connected Dominating Set (MCDS) have many practical applications in wireless sensor networks deployment and management. We propose two algorithms in this paper for solving the MCDS problem. The first algorithm called Memetic Algorithm for the MCDS problem, or MA-MCDS shortly. This is a new hybrid algorithm based on genetic algorithm in addition to local search strategies for the MCDS problem. In order to achieve fast performance, MA-MCDS algorithm uses local search and intensification procedures in addition to genetic operations. In the second algorithm, simulated annealing is used to enhance a stochastic local search with the ability to of run away from local solutions. In addition, we present a new objective function that effectively measure the quality of the solutions of our proposed algorithms. Both algorithms are tested using different benchmark test graph sets available in the literature, and shows good results in terms of solution quality.