Cooperative communication is a promising technique to provide spatial diversity in a virtual multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) manner. However, as application evolves toward a more practical situation, realistic constraints and issues such as channel state information (CSI) assumption must be accounted when developing appropriate cooperative schemes. In this thesis, we have addressed delay related problems in both single user pair cooperation (SUPC) and multiple user pair cooperation (MUPC) networks. In SUPC, realizing that the outdated CSI caused by delay between relay selection instant and transmission instant can impair diversity order severely, we propose an opportunistic multiple relay selection (MRS) scheme to achieve desired diversity order and combat the variation of the wireless environment. On the other hand, for multiple user pairs cooperation (MUPC), we start from one of the notable work, two hop opportunistic relaying (THOR), and analyze its the delay related problems. We propose an opportunistic pair scheduling (OPS) scheme which can get rid of the buffer requirement at the relay nodes of THOR and incurs no loss in terms of throughput scaling. Furthermore, we extend OPS to a general scheduling scheme, $L$ scheduling, which can achieve controllable throughput-and-delay trandeoffs. / Graduate