Cooperative transmission is an emerging communication technology that takes advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless channels. In cooperative transmission, the use of relays can create a virtual antenna array so that multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) techniques can be employed. Most existing work in this area has focused on the situation in which there are a small number of sources and relays and a destination. In this paper, cooperative relay networks with large numbers of nodes are analyzed, and in particular the asymptotic performance improvement of cooperative transmission over direction transmission and relay transmission is analyzed using random matrix theory. The key idea is to investigate the eigenvalue distributions related to channel capacity and to analyze the moments of this distribution in large wireless networks. A performance upper bound is derived, the performance in the low signal-to-noise-ratio regime is analyzed, and two approximations are obtained for high and low relay-to-destination link qualities, respectively. Finally, simulations are provided to validate the accuracy of the analytical results. The analysis in this paper provides important tools for the understanding and the design of large cooperative wireless networks.