To greatly increase spectral efficiency and improve network performance in wireless networks,a novel cooperative routing algorithm,namely maximum throughput cooperative routing(MTCR) algorithm,is proposed.According to cooperative link model,throughput analysis is presented to evaluate performance improvement in the process of exploiting cooperative commu-nication from physical layer to higher layer.Taking the throughput improvement as performance metric,a cooperative relay se-lection scheme is developed.Finally,based on the route constructed by adaptive forwarding cluster routing(AFCR) algorithm,each node on the route selects the optimum cooperative node from all the potential cooperative nodes to construct the coopera-tive link with maximum throughput so that cooperative route with maximum network throughput from source to destination can be set up.Simulation results show that compared with the noncooperative routing algorithm and minimum power selection de-code-and-forward(MPSDF) routing algorithm,the proposed algorithm can obviously improve network throughput in the pres-ence of low transmission power,large number of nodes and high spectral efficiency. To greatly increase spectral efficiency and improve network performance in wireless networks, a novel cooperative routing algorithm, namely maximum throughput cooperative routing (MTCR) algorithm, is proposed. According to cooperative link model, throughput analysis is presented to evaluate performance improvement in the process of exploiting cooperative commu-nication from physical layer to higher layer. Taking the throughput improvement as performance metric, a cooperative relay se-lection scheme is developed. Finally, based on the route constructed by adaptive forwarding cluster routing (AFCR) algorithm, each node on the route selects the optimum cooperative node from all the potential cooperative nodes to construct the coopera-tive link with maximum throughput so that cooperative route with maximum network throughput from source to destination can be set up. Simulation results show that compared with the noncooperative routing algorithm and minimum power selection de-code-and-forward (MPSDF) rou ting algorithm, the proposed algorithm can obviously improve network throughput in the pres-ence of low transmission power, large number of nodes and high spectral efficiency.