Reliability and Energy Consumption issues in large ubiquitous Wireless Sensor Networks are a cause of concern especially because there is an inherent conflict between the two: an increase in reliability usually leads to an increase in energy consumption. Conversely, energy conservation has been a priority research concern in wireless sensor nodes. Data aggregation from various nodes and its transmission to the sink node through multiple hops which is important for network reliability increases the overall energy consumption in the network. Several schemes were proposed in the past to address the reliability needs and also to minimize the energy consumption in the network. In this context, this paper proposes a novel strategy for IEEE802.15.4/ZigBee based networks by incorporating a Distributed Energy Aware Routing (DEAR) protocol with a localized Cooperative Caching algorithm that addresses the query generated by a requester node or sink node with datum already existing in the locally available cache memory or in the memory of its one-hop neighbors or by the source node. The DEAR protocol considers battery level as a key factor to include nodes in its routing path. The proposed model is evaluated on the basis of three scenarios which were considered to illustrate the impact of energy consumption on the reliability of WSNs.