Abstract: Cooperative communication and cognitive radio are the key candidates for the future mobile communication technologies. Focusing on the resource allocation issue in OFDM-based cooperative cognitive radio networks, an efficient cross-layer scheduling scheme is proposed. In the scheme, while taking strict interference control to protect the primary user, the most appropriate subcarrier pairs for the two phases transmission in each frame as well as optimal power is allocated to obtain a maximal rate during a superframes transmission. The optimization issue for scheduling scheme is solved effectively with a decomposition method. Simulation results indicate that the proposed cross-layer scheduling scheme brings a notable increase in the transmission rate, which confirms the feasibility and validity of the proposed scheduling scheme.