The non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique offers throughput improvement to meet the demands of the future generation of wireless communication networks. The objective of this work is to further improve the throughput by including an underlay cognitive radio network with an existing multi‐carrier NOMA network, using cooperative communication. The throughput is maximized by optimal resource allocation, namely, power allocation, subcarrier assignment, relay selection, user pairing, and subcarrier pairing. Optimal power allocation to the primary and secondary users is accomplished in a way that target rate constraints of the primary users are not affected. The throughput maximization is a combinatorial optimization problem, and the computational complexity increases as the number of users and/or subcarriers in the network increases. To this end, to reduce the computational complexity, a dynamic network resource allocation algorithm is proposed for combinatorial optimization. The simulation results show that the proposed network improves the throughput.