This work presents performance evaluation and energy optimization of a cooperative Wireless body area network (WBAN). Link metrics like Bit Error Rate (BER), Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR), spectral efficiency (SE), and outage probability have been investigated to evaluate the performance of non-cooperative and cooperative WBAN at different frequency bands supporting body-centric communication (Ultra-wideband (UWB), Worldwide Industrial, Scientific and Medical (W-ISM) band, US-ISM (U-ISM) band and Wireless Mobile Telemetry Services (WMTS)). Evaluation reveals that cooperative communication shows better performance by exhibiting improved SNR and SE and lower BER and outage probability compared to non-cooperative communication. A critical comparison of Amplify and forward (A&F) cooperation has been performed with decode and forward (D&F) cooperation. Results reveal that the D&F scheme performs better with increased SNR and SE and lower levels of BER and outage probability in comparison to the A&F scheme by 43.74%, 1.64%, 0.15%, and 99%, respectively. W-MTS with the highest SNR and SE and lowest BER and outage probability outperforms the other frequency bands under both non-cooperative and cooperative scenarios. Further, the threshold distance has been evaluated using the Eigenvalues to optimize the transmission energy for the D&F scenario to enhance the performance of on-body WBAN resulting in an average decrease of 3.8% in the transmitted energy, with UWB showing a maximum reduction of 5.25% thus making the network more energy efficient.