Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) fulfills the requirements to solve real-life applications due to their unattended nature. But, the main constraint faced by researchers is the energy available with sensor nodes. The network should have a longer lifetime to offer better data aggregation. So there is a need to prolong the life of sensor nodes and thus WSN. It is necessary to design energy-efficient operational schemes. One of the most suitable approaches to enhance energy efficiency is the clustering scheme, which enhances the performance parameters of WSN. Thus Adaptive Ranking based Energy-efficient Opportunistic routing (AREOR) is an opportunistic scheme that creates dynamic clusters and offers a longer lifetime to the network due to its heuristic. This scheme is modified based on the cooperation of nodes termed Cooperation Federated-AREOR (CF-AREOR), further enhancing the network’s performance parameters. This protocol is implemented using a network simulator, and its performance is analyzed based on the lifetime of the network based on factors like the number of alive nodes with respect to time, the first node dies time (FND), the last node dies time (LND), network lifetime, and even remaining energy in nodes. This protocol shows improved FND time, alive nodes, and longer network lifetime than existing well-known LEACH, AODV, ACO, IACR, and EMCBR. A performance increase in FND is 52% as compared to LEACH, and LND time is up to 84% increase. It shows that most of the network nodes are available for data forwarding & which increases the lifetime of the network significantly.