The invention discloses a method and apparatus for relay station downlink cooperative retransmission, wherein said method comprises: a relay station carrying out physical layer processing in advance on data which requires retransmitting according to different scenarios associated with different possible number of available wireless resources for retransmitting data in a retransmission subframe, generating corresponding OFDM signals, and monitoring the PCFICH of the retransmission subframe, and according to the monitoring result, selecting an OFDM signal which is corresponding to the determined number of available wireless resources from said OFDM signals to carry out retransmission transmitting. The present invention can efficiently solve the problem that the number of wireless resources varies during downlink retransmitting data and the relay station cooperative communication is unable to be carried out normally, without introducing any extra overhead and time delay, and without the control signaling, thus reducing the system complexity.