This paper presents an energy efficient selection of cooperative nodes with respect to their geographical location and the number of nodes participating in cooperative communications in wireless sensor networks. The cooperative communication in wireless sensor networks (WSN) gives us leverage to get the inherent advantages of its random node?s locations and the direction of the data flow. Depending on the channel conditions and the transmission distance, the number of cooperative nodes is selected, that participate in an energy efficient transmission/reception. Simulation results show that increasing the cooperative receive diversity, decreases the energy consumption per bit in cooperative communications. It has also been shown that the network backbone capacity can be increased by controlled displacement of antennas at base station at the expense of energy per bit.