In wireless distributed networks, cooperative relay and cooperative Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) techniques can be used to exploit the spatial and temporal diversity gain in order to increase the performance or reduce the transmission energy consumption. The energy efficiency of cooperative MIMO and relay techniques is then very useful for the Infrastructure to Vehicle (I2V) and Infrastructure to Infrastructure (I2I) communications in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) networks where the energy consumption of wireless nodes embedded on road infrastructure is constrained. In this paper, applications of cooperation between nodes to ITS networks are proposed and the performance and the energy consumption of cooperative relay and cooperative MIMO are investigated in comparison with the traditional multi-hop technique. The comparison between these cooperative techniques helps us to choose the optimal cooperative strategy in terms of energy consumption for energy constrained road infrastructure networks in ITS applications.