A simple modification of well known Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol is proposed to exploit cooperative diversity. Instead of selecting a single cluster-head, we propose M cluster-heads in each cluster to obtain a diversity of order M. The cluster-heads gather data from all the sensor nodes within the cluster using same technique as LEACH. Cluster-heads transmit gathered data cooperatively towards the destination or higher order cluster-head. We propose a code combining based cooperative diversity protocol which is similar to coded cooperation that maximizes the performance of the proposed cooperative LEACH protocol. The implementation of the proposed cooperative strategy is analyzed. We develop the upper bounds on bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) for our proposal. Space time block codes (STBC) are also a suitable candidate for our proposal. In this paper, we argue that the STBC performs worse than the code combining cooperation.