This paper addresses the issues of Base station—User Association and Resources Allocation (BUA‐RA) in OFDM‐TDMA based broadband wireless access (BWA) networks under passive optical networks (PON)‐WiMAX integration. With the powerful coordination capability at the optical line terminal (OLT), a key technology of inter‐cell cooperative transmission (CT) is incorporated in the integrated network architecture, which is called cooperative PON‐WiMAX network (CPWN). To achieve an efficient integration and inter‐cell cooperative transmission in the CPWNs, the BUA‐RA scheme is critical to the Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for each user. In order to minimize the network resource usage, we provide three new BUA‐RA schemes which first time employ the cooperative transmission in a multi‐cell BWA network. The three schemes are designed for three kinds of subscribers with different moving types, and can be adaptively applied based on the network load. Simulations are conducted to verify the proposed BUA‐RA schemes by comparing with those without cooperative transmission technology. Our results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed schemes, which are based on mathematical formulations and linearization. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.