— In this paper we study the multi-user diversity gain in the downlink of single-hop and multi-hop infrastructure-based networks. We propose a base-station coordinated cooperative relaying method, Cooperative Induced Multi-user Diversity Relaying (CIMDR), to overcome the fundamental limitations on the average achieved net throughput per-user. In the proposed method, multi-user diversity is induced and then exploited in a 2-hop relaying scheme to improve per user achieved data throughput. We show that by using the proposed method, the throughput per-user and the packet-drop-ratio are significantly improved.