ABSTRACTNetwork lifetime is one of the serious issues of energy-starved Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, an Extended Lifetime with Minimum Energy Consumption (ELMEC) scheme is proposed for reducing energy consumption of cooperative communication in WSN and to increase the network lifetime. The transmission distance, number of cooperating nodes of the Virtual Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (V-MIMO) and the modulation order are jointly optimised by the proposed scheme to augment the network lifetime and to consume minimum end-to-end energy. The total energy consumption per bit and network lifetime of the proposed scheme is compared with traditional minimum energy consumption scheme. It is observed that the proposed ELMEC scheme achieves significant increase in lifetime (i.e. 5.61 times, 9.61 times and 15.74 times more at Bit Error Rate (BER) of 10−3, 10−4 and 10−5 respectively) at the cost of slightly increased total energy consumption per bit (1.20 times, 1.23 times and 1.19 times more at BER of 10−3, 10−4 and 10−5 respectively) when compared with traditional scheme. Also, the proposed scheme is associated with much lower computational complexity than the traditional scheme; therefore, the proposed ELMEC scheme is suitable for prolonging the lifetime of the applications which demands high-quality reception signals.