In this paper, we address the rate control, the medium access control (MAC) and the routing problem for cooperative multi-hop wireless networks (MHWN) in the framework of the utility function maxi-mization. Compared to its counterpart in traditional wireless network, control method in the cooperative wireless network is much more complex, which is due to the constraints arising from the cooperation among the users and the contention for the wireless channel access. At first, we construct a general mathematics model for the cooperative MHWN. And then, we develop a cross-layer solution which consists of the link capacity detection by adjusting persistence probability at the MAC layer, the flow rate control by achieving the maximal utility at the transport layer and the optimal routing at the network layer. This proposal is designed in distributed manner in order to support a simple and efficient implementation for MHWN. Finally, fairness issue for the cooperative network is presented to improve the practical performance of the proposed solution. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution for the cooperative network.