Techniques for supporting communication in a wireless network are described. In an aspect, association and resource partitioning may be performed jointly to select serving base stations for user equipments (UEs) and to allocate available resources to base stations. In another aspect, adaptive association may be performed to select serving base stations for UEs. In one design, a base station computes local metrics for different possible actions related to association and resource partitioning (or only association). The base station receives local metrics for the possible actions from at least one neighbor base station and determines overall metrics for the possible actions based on the computed and received local metrics. The base station determines serving base stations for a set of UEs and resources allocated to the set of base stations (or just serving base stations for the set of UEs) based on the overall metrics for the possible actions.