Cooperative communication has emerged as a new dimension of diversity to emulate the strategies designed for multiple antenna systems, since a wireless mobile device may not be able to support multiple transmit antennas due to size, cost, or hardware limitations. Capacity optimization of the wireless network is performed by making changes in the physical layer of the network. In this article, we propose a Capacity-Optimized Cooperative (COCO) topology control scheme to improve the network capacity in MANETs by jointly considering both upper layer network capacity and physical layer cooperative communications. Simulations in the network simulator are performed to show the efficiency of the system.