In this dissertation, we consider the cooperative communications using user relays for various downlink channel models.We first propose a user relaying scheme based on bit concatenation is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channels. In a broadcasting phase, a part of information for a destination user is concatenated to data for a relaying user and transmitted to the relaying user. The destination user receives the part of information via the relaying user in a relaying phase in addition to the data in thebroadcasting phase. An achievable rate region for the proposed scheme is derived and an algorithm to characterize the boundary of the rate region is proposed. Our analysis shows that the proposed user relaying in a MIMO BC expands the achievable rate region for the zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC) in the MIMO BC withoutrelaying. It is also shown that the proposed user relaying scheme always outperforms a superposition coding (SC) based user relaying scheme. Optimal and suboptimal user pair scheduling algorithms are investigated for a two-user MIMO BC and the proposed suboptimal user pair scheduling scheme is shown to approach the optimal schedulingwhen the relaying channel gain is large.Second, We propose a cooperative user relaying scheme for a two-user multiple antenna downlink cellular system where each user has to receive a certain required amount of information. A user who successfully receives its required amount of information is supposed to help the other user in receiving its required amount of information through cooperative user relaying. For the proposed cooperative user relaying scheme, we jointly design linear beamformers at the base station (BS) over three transmission phases to minimize the total transmission time required for both users to receive their respective required amounts of information, whichturns out to be the approximate maximization of the sum throughput. In addition, considering a practical hy...