Abstract: The present invention proposes a method of communication in a wireless relay network for finding group of relays that minimizes total energy consumption to send one successful bit to destination node, under reliability condition expressed in terms of average BER level, said method comprising three main phases in the manner that a reservation stage where cooperative data transmission request is made by the source node, an ACO epoch, where the announcements of the candidate relays are sent, the cooperation set is formed and power levels are assigned, and the cooperative data transmission stage itself, are defined.