SummaryCooperative transmission is of great significance in data transmission and resource schedule in mobile cellular communication networks. To attain the desired network transmission performance objectives over the whole cellular network system, we propose an appropriate cooperative data transmission scheme to optimize the data delivery efficiency in terms of the transmission time consumption for each and every transmission group. The proposed transmission optimization scheme includes the tasks of determining the transmission group, allocating the channel rate resource, specifying the cooperative transmission mechanism, and performing resource allocation and schedule as well. Firstly, we propose a utility function based rate allocation scheme to optimize the channel rate resource utilization for all those transmission groups over the cellular communication network. Based on it, we further present a cooperative data transmission scheme to deal with the data delivery and reception for all those subgroups with high efficiency over the whole network system. Particularly, we propose a resource efficiency function‐based coordination scheduling (EFCS) scheme to conduct the cooperative data transmission and resource schedule as well for each transmission group within the network. The EFCS scheme facilitates to determine the subgroups for schedule over each scheduling cycle, which can produce the best data transmission efficiency across both the direct and cooperative transmission hop. Both the theoretical analysis and the simulation evaluation results verify the superior performance of our proposed cooperative data transmission scheme.