In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative routing protocol (NCRP) for wireless networks. The proposed protocol uses cooperative transmission to improve end-to-end outage probability. The broadcast nature ensures that the destination can receive a packet from the source or from the relays and if it cannot correctly decode the packet, the successful relays will start a retransmission. The NCRP protocol can skip some transmissions from the intermediate relays, thereby reducing the total power consumption. Theoretical results are derived and verified by simulation results.