SummaryThis paper proposes a distributed coordination framework with opportunistic scheduling among multiple users as opposed to the existing works on the multiple‐cell cooperative beamforming problem that deals with a single active user in each cell. In this cross‐layer design framework that deals with the beamforming in the physical layer and multiuser scheduling in the upper layer, radio resource management and inter‐cell coordination issues are jointly considered to improve the cell‐edge throughput performance by trading off their individual benefit in an optimal manner. Our simulation results demonstrated that its performance can reach up to 85% of its upper bound at the cell boundary. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.