In recent years, the concept of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has gathered much attention due to its potential to offer high spectral efficiency, present user fairness and grant free access to sixth generation (6G) vehicular networks. This paper proposes a new optimization framework for NOMA-enabled cooperative vehicular network. In particular, we jointly optimize the vehicle paring, channel assignment, and power allocation at source and relaying vehicles. The objective is to maximize the sum rate of the system subject to the power allocation, minimum rate, relay battery lifetime and successive interference cancelation constraints. To solve the joint optimization problem efficiently, we adopt duality theory followed by Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, where the dual variables are iteratively computed through sub-gradient method. Two less complex suboptimal schemes are also presented as the benchmark cooperative vehicular schemes. Simulation results compare the performance of the proposed joint optimization scheme compared to the other benchmark cooperative vehicular schemes.