A novel multirate media access control based co-operative scheme has been proposed. It has been observed that any co-operative scheme gives a better performance only if the helper nodes selected to, relay the transmission from source to destination are reliable enough. Murad Khalid et.al has already proposed a protocol [24] where more than one helper nodes are selected to improve the reliability, so that if one fails the other can be used as a backup. But in this paper focus is on selection of reliable helpers. If a helper node has a high data rate, has successfully relayed traffic in the past and also has some minimum amount of energy left , not only for relaying traffic for others but also to conduct its own transmissions, then it acts as a suitable candidate to be chosen as a helper node. Such a co-operatives scheme enhances the throughput, reliability and overall performance of the network.Simulation has been conducted to show that the proposed scheme performs better than the