Cooperative transmission is a promising way to improve system performance in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based cellular networks.This paper proposes two heuristic cooperation schemes including relay selection and resource allocation using hierarchical modulation (HM) to fully exploit the radio resources in cellular networks where user equipments (UEs) relay for each other.The relay selection procedure considers both the channel conditions and the energies left in relays to make the cooperative communications behave better.To mitigate the spectrum efficiency loss due to the half-duplex mode,the bits of relayaided UE and its relay (which is also a UE) are transmitted simultaneously in one sub-channel using HM to improve the utilization efficiency of sub-channels.Besides,time resources are used effectively with the adaptively changed proportion of the two sub-frames divided for relay transmission.Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can improve the spectrum efficiency compared with the traditional schemes.