A cooperative communication system is provided. The cooperative communication system includes a transmitter that generates a codeword from data blocks based on a long message encoding scheme, and multicasts a signal including the codeword; relays, each relay configured to receive the multicasted signal, encode the multicasted signal using a encoding scheme independent from encoding schemes of other relays to generate a random-mapped signal of the data blocks, and relay the random-mapped signal of the data blocks; and a receiver that receives signals relayed by the relays, and generates the data blocks from the signals based on a joint decoding scheme.