In this dissertation, we study cross-layer design for cooperative wireless data communication networks. Based on the characteristics of cooperative wireless communications, and the requirement of Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for data networks, we consider cross-layer system design for cooperative wireless networking. Three major design issues which cover cooperative link establishment, information security of cooperative communications, and cross-layer cooperative transmission scheduling, are investigated. Specifically, we follow the communication procedure in cooperative wireless systems and investigate several cross-layer design problems. Considering the queueing behavior of data buffers at the candidate relays, we study relay selection from a queue-aware perspective which takes into account the queueing systems at both the source and the potential relays. With the cooperative link established, we then study the secret key establishment problem by cross-layer cooperative discussion. Then cross-layer transmission scheduling is investigated from two perspectives. We first look at cross-layer adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), which takes both the channel condition and traffic intensity into consideration in the scheduling design. A more general queue-aware scheduler state selection mechanism based on buffer queue occupancy is studied, and optimization by nonlinear integer programming is presented. / Graduate / 0544