Energy efficient management and routing is one of the issues which affect the practical deployment of wireless ad hoc sensor networks, as it directly impacts network reliability and durability. Saving energy in a sensor network depends to a large extent on the percentage of time that its nodes are in the idle state, i.e. not transmitting or receiving. Thus power aware routing algorithms have to be used. In this paper we propose a low duty cycle Zone Routing-like communication scheme, conceived to efficiently manage transmission-reception resources of the nodes in path discovery and routing, to ultimately optimize energy consumption. The algorithm is based on the "social" cooperation of nodes in neighbourhoods guided by the heuristic objective of keeping as small as reasonably possible any transmission operation and avoiding the redundant sending of messages, while pursuing the route which locally minimizes the transaction delay